MWP 2010 Things I don't understand

[stan_qaz]

I'm sorry to hear you are having these hassles and rusticdog should be able to sort them out for you but I wanted to chip in and let you know that once it gets sorted you should be a lot happier.

My FA hit rate is over 50% on spam, higher on the morning check and lower once I start picking up mail every five minutes. Checking every 15 shows better performance if you aren't in a rush to get your mail.

The default blacklist servers are doing a decent job, you might want to look at your v6 set and see if you want to bring any others over to 2010.

The Bayesian is doing a really good job on most mail, as rusticdog mentioned it tends to run to safety over tagging all the spam and short (5-10 words) messages tend to score unknown and it does take a while to get the word lists full and get the higher scores from that. Once you have several thousand words in the lists you can fiddle the Bayesian settings to make MW a bit more paranoid and tag more spam by setting the "good token weight" from the default of 2 down to 1 DON'T DO THAT until you have several thousand words trained!

Folks have been fooling with the lines fetched to find a sweet spot for time versus accuracy, the minimum for good FA performance is about 80 but most of the beta testers have settled in the 100-200 range. Messages from pest-holes like Yahoo have 200 lines of worthless HTML before the first real word in the message so if you get a lot of them 250-300 is probably a better range. A few folks have gone to 999 lines (the maximum) to enable as much as possible of the message to be restored.

There are a couple locked topics on the guts of the Bayesian and other new stuff as well as a couple on doing filters in the new 2010 way. I love filters! My message hit rate is near 100% for my set of filters. There is a topic on blacklisting that offers up a list of country and top level domains that can be really handy but you need to load it and then trim out the ones you get real mail from.

The weighting method of spam evaluation makes a huge difference in accuracy and there are more improvements on the drawing board to make the tools even better.

Hang in there and once your glitches are sorted you are going to be happy.

[rusticdog]

Nothing on the Origin of Spam or FirstAlert icons. Logs sent as suggested.

Does your email pass through your ISP's spam filter and does that spam filter add server records to the email headers? If that's the case, then this version of MailWasher won't get an Origin of Spam hit as it will be checking one of your ISP's servers. v6.x is able to look through the entries added by ISP's spam filtering and so is better in this regard.

Yeah that's exactly what was happening. I've sent eyeofskye a replacement DNSBLServerList.xml that includes support for his email provider, it will work in the meantime at least.

[anniebrion]

Do you have a list that supports Fasthosts as I've never had an Origin of Spam hit, I guess this might be a similar issue

Does this also affect Gmail?

[rusticdog]

Do you have a list that supports Fasthosts as I've never had an Origin of Spam hit, I guess this might be a similar issue

Does this also affect Gmail?

Replace this in the Help >> Common Files folder.


GMail, already catered for

[anniebrion]

Thanking you kindly

I'll have to see if I get any hits now. 99% of my Gmail is forwarded via Fasthosts so this might be the resaon for the lack of hits there too.

[eyeofskye]

Nothing on the Origin of Spam or FirstAlert icons. Logs sent as suggested.

Does your email pass through your ISP's spam filter and does that spam filter add server records to the email headers? If that's the case, then this version of MailWasher won't get an Origin of Spam hit as it will be checking one of your ISP's servers. v6.x is able to look through the entries added by ISP's spam filtering and so is better in this regard.

Does v6.x get a FirstAlert! hit?

Yes it does add records to the header. Chris has been in touch and I now have been given a modified file for mailwasher that may fix this specific problem.

According to v6 statistics FirstAlert IS adjudicating on my incoming mail.

Latest: don't think the fix is working.

[ataraxy]

Do you have a list that supports Fasthosts as I've never had an Origin of Spam hit, I guess this might be a similar issue

Does this also affect Gmail?

Replace this in the Help >> Common Files folder.

Is the DNSBLServerList.xml overwritten when you install a new version of MailWasher?

[rusticdog]

I cannot recall if it overwrites. I can find out before it should matter.


eyeofskye if you think that file hasn't helped the DNSBL issue, then wait until more emails received, do another log send. FirstAlert was working fine, so it's just not catching these particular emails.

[anniebrion]

Thanks RD, I can confirm that I have just seen my first "Origin of Spam" hit using my new DNSBLServerList.xml

[anniebrion]

I cannot recall if it overwrites. I can find out before it should matter.

It does get overwritten during an update