Another look at Mozilla’s anti-spam features

I downloaded and installed the most recent Mozilla 1.3 alpha build today (actually from Dec. 12).
For the past few weeks, I’d been using a nightly build I downloaded back in early November. It was buggy, but without assurance that any given night’s build would be any more or less stable than what I already had, I stuck with the familiar.

Initial impressions: The spam filtering still isn’t complete but it works (it just won’t act on the spam it finds–yet). The speed is comparable to anything else I’ve used, and one annoying bug in the mail client is gone. I’ve grown so used to having the spam filtering that I’ll put up with almost anything in order to have it–I get an unbearable amount of spam, and Mozilla quickly identifies it all for me. After a couple of months of using it, I think it’s pretty safe to say only one or two messages per week get past it anymore. I can definitely live with that.

Once when I visited news.google.com in the browser and clicked on a link, after I hit the back button I got a confusing “The file / can’t be found”. The nightly builds I used previously had the same bug. So far that’s the only one I’ve found, and the workaround is to visit a couple other sites, then go back to the troublesome one.

I’ve only been messing with it for a few hours so I can’t make any sound judgments on its quality. But as an evolutionary, not revolutionary, upgrade from its predecessor, it ought to be fairly stable.

If you’re desperate to get unburied from beneath an avalanche of spam and you’re willing to put up with a few quirks from your Web browser in order to do it, this is the most effective filter I’ve found yet.

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3 thoughts on “Another look at Mozilla’s anti-spam features

  • December 30, 2002 at 8:51 pm
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    Another mail client with Spam abilities is Poco. I’ve been using it for many months but only just started using the spam filtering ability in the last two weeks. Out of 110 spam emails in that time, (Which is a low number to some) only 2 have gotten through. Those were quickly taken care of by right clicking and selecting block sender’s domain.

  • December 30, 2002 at 10:56 pm
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    The most effective naive bayes spam filter is popfile.

    Admittedly, it only works with pop3 accounts as John has not written the imap interace yet, but it is a WONDERFUL naive bayes spam filter, and is working extremely well at this point.

    popfile.sourceforge.net

    Rick

  • January 20, 2003 at 6:48 am
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    If you keep telling mozilla what is spam, then yes – it is a good addition to spamassasin (I’m assuming it has some sort of heuristics – cause that works).

    It can detect junk mail lists you are subscribed to, which spamassasin can often treat as legit mailing lists. But mozilla can’t detect most of the spam which spamassasin does.

    Hence you need to use both, and keep spamassasin uptodate. And if you’re filtering for spam on the server – you may as well filter for virii.

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