Each month, we go through our spamtraps (E-mail addresses designed to collect spam), to find out which spam tests were most effective at catching spam. The results this month are based on over 230,000 spams that were received, all in December 2003. This represents more than a 10% increase in spam over last month. In December 2003 we received over 13 times as much spam as in December, 2002.

The following is a list of tests that we run against the E-mails arriving at the spamtraps, and what percentage of the spam they caught (it may be easier to read if you use a fixed-width font):


WEIGHT10 99.72% NOLEGITCONTENT 98.52% WEIGHT20 98.10% SNIFFER 96.03% IPNOTINMX 92.26% SPAMCHK 92.02% ALLIGATE 82.01% SPAMCOP 81.48% MAILDEFLECTOR 74.41% DSBLALL 61.12% DSBL 61.02% BLARSBL 52.14% CBL 43.67% NOABUSE 42.89% FIVETENSRC 42.72% BADHEADERS 40.73% SORBS-DUHL 40.71% NOPOSTMASTER 36.12% FREEMAIL 33.86% NJABLPROXIES 24.57% HELO 23.87% REVDNS 23.75% AHBL 20.79% ROUTING 20.23% SORBS-SOCKS 15.22% SPAMHAUS 15.20% SPAMHEADERS 12.92% SORBS-HTTP 12.52% SPAMMANAGER 12.08% RSL 11.09% DSN 10.74% NJABLSOURCES 10.35% IPWHOIS 9.77% SORBS-SPAM 7.94% COMMENTS 7.91% NJABLDUL 6.59% BASE64 6.57% BLITZEDALL 6.38% LNGSDUL 4.58% FABELSOURCES 4.00% FIVETENIGNORE 2.95% SPAMBAG 2.59% MAILFROM 2.25% SORBS-MISC 2.03% BADWHOIS 1.88% NJABL 1.57% INTERSIL 1.49% ORDB 1.22% JIPPG-DUL 0.83% FIVETENOPTIN 0.75% VOX 0.73% ROPE 0.63% PIGS 0.51% DNSRBL-DUN 0.43% NONENGLISH 0.39% LNGSBLOCK 0.31% KITHRUP 0.29% KUNDENSERVER 0.22% SORBS-ZOMBIE 0.18% SORBS-SMTP 0.17% DSBLMULTI 0.17% FIVETENOTHER 0.07% FIVETENMULTI 0.04% DNSMAILLIST 0.03% DEVNULL 0.03% JIPPG-DULJP 0.01%


The WEIGHT10 and WEIGHT20 tests are a weighting system that assigns a weight to each E-mail, based on the spam tests that fail, so they don't really count as spam tests by themselves (but, they show that you can catch as much as 98-99+% of spam with extremely few false positives, and without relying on a single spam test). It is also important to note that different tests are more likely to produce false positives (such as the IPNOTINMX, REVDNS, and SPAMHEADERS tests, that all catch a lot of spam, but catch a lot of legitimate mail as well); those tests need to be used in a weighting system, so E-mail will only be marked as spam if it fails a combination of tests. The NOLEGITCONTENT and IPNOTINMX tests were designed to help identify legitimate E-mail (rather than spam), which accounts for their high percentages.


It is interesting to note that at least 40% of the spam in November could safely be caught by the BADHEADERS test (since no RFC-compliant mail client will send out E-mail that fails the BADHEADERS test).

There are 2 spam tests that caught over 90% of the spam in our spamtraps: SNIFFER ( http://www.sortmonster.com ) and SPAMCHK ( www.spamchk.com ) (at its strictest setting).

More information on most of the spam tests shown above can be found at http://www.declude.com/junkmail/support/ip4r.htm . You can look up an IP address using the Spam Database Lookup tool at http://www.DNSstuff.com to see what spam databases it is listed in. The most recent 20 spams in our spamtraps, and the tests they failed, can be found at http://www.declude.com/spamtrap.htm .

-Scott
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