Sounds like they might be creating spam "checksums" and comparing that to the SMTP stream coming across the firewall at the packet level, so, in theory, it never reaches the mta.
-Jim -----Original Message----- From: Ryan Thompson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, August 24, 2004 3:19 PM To: Dave Schneider Cc: Chris Santerre; [email protected] Subject: RE: [OT] Spam FIREWALL software Dave Schneider wrote to Chris Santerre and [email protected]: > Am I the only one that chokes on the "1 false positive out of 25000" > ??!! Thats like..hundreds an hour in my environments... Ill stick to > my schema.. Hi Dave, As others have mentioned, 1/25000 FP rate is rather good. However, you've misquoted them. Their quote refers to "misclassifying only one out of 25,000 emails". "Misclassifying" is ambiguous. It *might* mean, out of 25,000 emails, they had only one FP *or* FN (you guess which one), which would indeed be impressive (but not unprecedented)... or it might mean their filter is so aggressive that they only had 1 FN out of 25,000, but haven't bothered to publish their FP rate... which might mean it's pretty abysmal. I can filter 100% of your spam, guaranteed! Are you interested? OK, I thought so. Read on! I have a groundbreaking product that stops spam at the MTA level without even touching disk or memory. I call it the /dev/nullifier. The algorithm is top secret. I don't have hard numbers on the effect on legitimate mail, but we haven't seen any false positives since implementing this revolutionary approach to spam blocking. Unlike content-based filtering, ours does not require learning. And, Chris, you're not the only one who's more than a little jaded. ;-) - Ryan -- Ryan Thompson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> SaskNow Technologies - http://www.sasknow.com 901-1st Avenue North - Saskatoon, SK - S7K 1Y4 Tel: 306-664-3600 Fax: 306-244-7037 Saskatoon Toll-Free: 877-727-5669 (877-SASKNOW) North America
