On Thu, 2023-06-22 at 08:46 -0300, George N. White III wrote:
Thunderbird uses a Baysian filter that is trained based on the user
turning the "SPAM" flag on or off, so the only internal logic should
be the initial Baysian filter setting. It could be useful to
maintain an assortment of SPAM messages (maybe headers would be
enough) for training, or a way to transfer a trained filter from one
system to another.
Back when I used an email client with Bayesian filtering (and trusted
it - these days I don't), I kept all the spam in a spam folder. If I
needed to train a new email client, I'd highlight all the spam in that
folder and mark it spam. And highlight a mass of some *other* mail
marking it non-spam. But if I were using an email client that I didn't
trust to not start executing attacks embedded in the mail, I wouldn't
do that (thinking of a particular Microsoft client about that).
I've found *all* spam filtering to be flawed. They let spam through,
and they falsely flag mail as being spam, meaning that you have to
check through your spam folder looking for real messages all the time.
If you're doing that, you may as well do that in your inbox and enjoy
hitting delete on spam, and reporting some of it.
Most of it used to come from dictionary attacks, they'd string together
common people's names and see if they existed on big domain names. My
name's not that usual. Imagine the amount of crap that the John Smiths
of this world put up with. And the rest came from address harvesting.
I don't give my email address away to all and sundry, my website holds
a deliberately mangled version of it, and I deliberately post to this
mailing list using an address that deletes all mail sent to it (I read
the actual list messages sent to another address).
I found that mailing lists were the biggest sources for spam. Seconded
by organisations who said they wanted your details for receipts, etc,
and would sell their data.
I've found that simply keeping my email address out of the hands of
spammers has been the most effective way to stop spam. And I don't
have to continually manage some badly thought out spam filter program.
I only get one or two spams a day, it's been that way for decades, long
before major ISPs starting to do anything to stop spam. Back then, it
was all up to us to handle it.
--
uname -rsvp
Linux 3.10.0-1160.90.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Thu May 4 15:21:22 UTC 2023 x86_64
Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted.
I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list.