ok thanks. i think i've seen that before, but i'll check that out agian. i believe i had disregarded it before because you had to run another process at all times, that constantly scanned your pop3 port -- i just didn't like the idea of that. i suppose i'm just a bit anal about my task manager. |violin|

I was using spamkiller before this and although it was good, the memory overhead of running it was an issue for me. One major advantage of spambayes is that it has almost no memory overhead compared to most other programs.

The way spambayes works is as a proxy client.. which I do leave running all the time, but only needs to be active when you want to check email.. the client is tiny anyway and is no problem to run as a startup service.

Basically you tell spambayes what your pop3 account details are.. then change your email client to use "localhost" as the pop3 address.

Then when you go to collect email your normal email program conects to your spambayes proxy, the proxy connects to your email server and collects the mail... and simply adds a "mark" on each message if it thinks it is definitely Spam, definitelty a Good email or Unsure.. It doesnt delete mail or anything.. just rates it.

Then you can use your current email clients rules to sort the email using those "marks"

So its probably good for your anal problem ;-)

I am also going to check out the Cloudmark one now too though. Based on what others have said in this thread it seems to be worth the effort.. there is so many new ideas on how to deal with email around now I am hopeful SPAM will be a non-issue of the past in the forseeable future.

So what do you have to do to "train" spambayes? It seems that if it's not built directly into the e-mail client, as in a "junk mail/good mail" button like motino has, it would be easier just to delete the spam.

thanks for your time,
josho

when you first setup spambayes you enable a proxy cache that stores a copy of all the mail it sees... to "train" spambayes you use a browser based admin utilty to mark which messages were the SPAM and which were the HAM..

Once it is trained to the point it gets all SPAM hits correct and most HAM hits marked as HAM rather than UNSURE, you turn of the caching part.

It's hard to explain without looking at it.. i know I didnt get it until I used it anyway.. But basically it is ultimately flexible and it's simplistic ideaolgy in the way you incorporate it into your existing system is brilliant in my mind..

I understand what you mean though... this just does one thing.. but i imagine you could set it up so spam was automatically reported to spamcop and other such things.. it's not a microsoft boxed product type app though.. so doing all that isnt point and click.

It is easy to install and test without fucking up any existing spam filering or email client rules btw... it's not a pain to try and then discard.

All of these "solutions" still mean you have to download the email... and if you get as many as I do.. that is gonna be significant BW over time.

MailWasher 4.0 -

deletes from server,
can automatically delete SPAM(from server),
compares incomings to SpamCop/ORDB,
can automatically report to SpamCop,
can bounce spam,
blacklist/whitelist,
doesnt add anything to email messages
essentially unlimited filters,
learns as it goes spam/ham
Easy setup,
Free trial,
< $40.00

it is the only thing close to an answer that I know of
http://www.firetrust.com/products/pro/

I agree with DangerDave. I have tried several programs, but MailWasher beats them all imho. An excellent piece of software at a very low price. And extremely easy to customize...

I'd never guess that I'd ever start quality thread like this! |roses|

p.s. MailWasher 4.0 sounds promising, I'll give it a try!

saL