"Jack Glendening" wrote in message
hlink.net...
F.L. Whiteley wrote:
blackholing 10,000 spams/month at the user-configurable server
pre-filter

If you are getting and ignoring over 3000 emails per _day_ I can't see
that you can know that none of those are legitimate email. I don't know
of any perfect spam filter and the black hole lists are also not perfect
as there are documented cases of innocent IPs being "collateral damage"
of over-zealous listings.

340/day. Not ignored, but a quick scan suffices.

Please visit www.mailarmory.com and look over the website, including the
tools. It's a combo of fuzzy logic, RBL's,

Also www.greeleynet.com/mailarmory/mailarmory.ppt for a user view.

Sorry the PP presentation is a devoid of comments, that was an audible at
our monthly users group meeting. Briefly,

1. It's user configurable. You can view what is filtered and choose to add
it to your accept list, reject list, or ignore it. The accept and reject
lists also allow wildcards, like *drjack.net, which would allow anything
from that domain through, list or whatever. Customer education is important
and it does take some time daily to tweak settings. I check in and purge
the AM and PM and again when demonstrating to new clients.

2. I currently run my account at aggression 2. Two points and it's
filtered. The captured mail can be sorted by any column and there is also a
search tool. Personally I recommend sorting by Type, that is, the 'weight'
given any particular message. The lower the weight, the less likely to be
spam. Since the mailarmory engine 'learns', there is the possibility of
weights being a little odd after a major engine upgrade as we did for the
first time this past July. That was the first time I'd seen legitimate
e-mail gaining 8 points and it only happened over a period of 3-4 days while
the engine 're-educated' itself to mail patterns so that no legitimate
e-mail gets 8 points again. No legitimate e-mail got over 8 points during
this short period. If you notice, you can optionally Autotrash e-mail 8
points and above. Trust me, most Viagra and Porn gets at least 8 points and
often over 10. The virus filtering is as effective as any installed. We
still recommend an client anti-virus since cracked web sites can still
download trojans and malicious scripts that may can download dangerous code.

3. The claim that it can be 99.7 effective is not spurious, but it is an
interactive tool and requires the user to pay some attention. Mailarmory
resides on a Sonet pipe that can lit to meet subscriber needs. It operates
across multiple servers, n-expandable to accomodate business, corporate, and
ISP mail servers. An Incredimail message forwarded by an AOL or Hotmail
user may come in at 6 or 7, but the bulk of these are forwarded noise. Mail
may reside in the captured area for 4 hours to 14 days, by user discretion.
I have about 120 entries in my accept list and 6 in my reject list after 18
months. I've been posting to the USENET from this e-mail address since
1996. The biggest increase in SPAM followed expiration of our MAPS RBL
subscription in August 2002 accompanied by the release of Mailarmory to all
customers.

4. Yeah, it's been DDOS'd. Results in some queuing, but no loss. Stood up
a lot better than the RBL sites that were thrashed.

Frank Whiteley
fuzzy logic, RBL databases, carries a price, and takes a chunk of processing
power