Spam: or, ‘SlashDot spam drama’. So, a few days ago, I forwarded a link to a paper I’d been sent — it’s a great paper, and I’m not just saying that because SpamAssassin did well — it really tests some of the popular open-source spam filters comprehensively, and correctly. (The authors have 24 years of information retrieval research between them.)
The results have been pretty incendiary. ;) Here’s a timeline with links, in case you were wondering where we are right now:
- I forward A Study of Supervised Spam Detection Applied to Eight Months of Personal Email, Gordon Cormack and Thomas Lynam, to the SpamAssassin-dev mailing list for some quiet review. ;)
- it hit Slashdot (that was quick) entitled ‘Spamassassin Beats CRM-114 In Anti-Spam Shootout’. A bit over-the-top, but that’s Slashdot for ya.
- The DSPAM author responds with a SlashDot post entitled Response to Gordon Cormack’s Study of Spam Detection, linking to ‘an appropriate response to Cormack’s technical errors’ — with a few errors of its own.
- Some follow-ups: Henry Stern’s, my own, and Lynam and Cormack’s.