SpamAnti.net
in May 2004

News of the world

• eHost.it against SPAM
• Another tool: EMP
• Traffic Magnet
• SPAM fighter
• MailWasher Pro
• Spam instead of bombs? Really?
• Belgium starts fighting SPAM
• French CNIL sends spammers to trial
• Collectif Anti Spam

eHost.it against SPAM

An italian ISP fights against SPAM and lists the loosers who try to use their servers for SPAM. It was time to fight back.

http://www.lonevanex.com/

Extensible Messaging Platform is a server based anti-spam filter and is based on patterns (not keywords). More détails on http://www.jak.com.

A neat little paper about this spammer.

This filtering tool works with Outlook to clean out your inbox. Apparently, its best argument is the fact that it asks you to tell what message is SPAM. When several users report the same, the SPAM automatically is filtered out for the million other users. Recommended.

MailWasher (an already very good SPAM filter) has been improved recently to MailWasher Pro. Recommended.

I would not have expected this in the worlld of SPAM. Today, we learn that the US Army is using this psychological weapon to convince Iraqi officers of defecting to the allied coalition...

Source : The Register

Like the French CNIL in the recent months, the Commission of privacy of the Belgian government just opened a mailbox to receive SPAM: spam@privacy.fgov.be

It is an excellent first step in the right direction (fighting against SPAM). Kudos!

If you helped CNIL by sending sample SPAM to them, be thanked!

It had a great postive effect: five French companies will be tried to SPAM upon a formal request by CNIL for their SPAM activities. A very bright example and a major event in France where the fight against SPAM is escalating quickly now (and the European Directive against SPAM will be implemented in French law next year).

Kudos to CNIL!

While English-speaking people are publishing a lot of web sites about fighting SPAM, this is not the same for French-speaking support. So, let's point again to our good friends at:

News of this site

• K9 evaluation
• SpamPal
• New technique observed
• CNIL web site advises using

This Summer, I started an extended evaluation of the K9 software (a Bayesian filter software). I think I can now give some useful conclusions:

• success rate is rather high (easily more than 97%), but hardly stays put at more than 99% leading to too many losses of useful messages
• the failure rate somehow leads to a false sense of tranquility (and prohibits automatic destruction of the SPAM-tagged messages), but allows an easier work.
• the learning period may be very long (in my case roughly 4 months and 5000 messages filtered).

http://www.keir.net/

SpamPal for Windows

This software is an easy way to filter out SPAM using the RBL lists like MAPS (much esaier than using a server like Mercury). Simple and powerful.

http://www.spampal.org.uk/
http://spampal.corlobe.tk/ (traduction en français)

Apparently, there is a new technique used by spammers. It is becoming a little problem since the simplest keyword-based filters do not detect these messages as SPAM. The text is riddled with random HTML comments breaking all words in smaller parts while leaving the message still readable by Outlook Express users.

This should lead to a new evolution of counter-measures and filter programs.

French CNIL is always very cautious in what links they create on their web site. One more reason for me to be happy that SpamAnti is publicly recommended by French CNIL in its comments about SPAM and how to react to it in a judicial context.

A big thanks to all the SPAM-fighting team at the CNIL!