[Spambayes] Virus Bulletin Anti-spam Testing

[Amedee Van Gasse]

Allison Sketchley schreef:
>  
> You might have already learnt from other sources that Virus Bulletin is
> planning to implement anti-spam testing in the near future and I am
> writing to you to see if there might be any interest to participate in
> this new and exciting venture with your open source anti-spam product. 
>  
> I have attached by way of information the article published in the
> January edition of the Virus Bulletin magazine which outlines the
> proposed test methodology, as well as a recent press release announcing
> the new tests.
>   
> Please feel free to pass this information onto any other potentially
> interested parties within your organisation and if you, or they, should
> have any questions or feedback please contact Martijn Grooten, Anti-spam
> Test Director (martijn.grooten at virusbtn.com
> <mailto:martijn.grooten at virusbtn.com>) for any technical based queries
> or myself for any financial/administrative queries.
>  
> Look forward to hearing from you.

In the proposed test methodology you write the following:

"To take part in Virus Bulletin’s anti-spam tests, products
must be able to accept SMTP transfers and classify email
into two categories: ham and spam."

According to the Spambayes FAQ on
http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/faq.html, Spambayes is not an MTA
(postfix, exchange,...) spam filter. It works by sitting between the MTA
or the MDA (procmail,...) and the MUA (outlook, thunderbird, mutt,...)
as a POP or IMAP proxy. In case of the Outlook plugin and the upcoming
Thunderbird plugin, it even works *after* the MUA.

I know that there have been some people who have tried to implement
Spambayes as a MTA spamfilter, but these attempts were all very
experimental, and they were done by individual Spambayes users. I don't
think that there will ever be an "official" build for Spambayes at the
SMTP. There is always SpamAssassin for those who want that.

However, I am very interested to see how other Software Libre products
perform that do work on SMTP level, like SpamAssassin. How well do they
compare to commercial products?


Disclaimer: I am not a Spambayes developer, I'm just a regular user.
By sending your email to a public mailing list, you have agreed that any
user of Spambayes may read your email, and that any user may reply to it.

Kind regards,
Amedee Van Gasse