POPfile vs. PocoMail Junk Filters--which is better?

[Mitch Wagner]

I used POPfile for years and found it to be a superior spam filter. I've been using the current version of PocoMail since Tuesday evening, and finding its junk mail filter to be inferior to what I remember from POPfile's. I'm thinking of switching back. Any opinions from anyone familiar with both POPfile and the junk mail filter in PocoMail?

This is not a criticism of PocoMail; so far I'm loving it. And one of its virtues is that it integrates pretty easily into POPfile.

I used PocoMail's junk filter alone for a couple of days, and then I started using <a href="http://www.pocosystems.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=880">this hack</a> for improving the Junk Mail filter's accuracy. But I'm *still* finding the PocoMail junk filter lets a lot of spam through. And I've been training the Bayesian filter continuously for three days.

[Mitch Wagner]

Sorry about the HTML in the previous.

[SFCurley]

No question . . . in my experience, POPFile got very accurate, very quickly. PM's Bayesian took longer, and based on all my readings of the forums, have produced less consistent results across the user base, whereas POPFile seems to me more universally accuracte after a relatively small amount of training.

That said, I've been able to get PM's Bayesian filters to about 99% accuracy, with 0.33% false negatives, and 0.42% false positives over a sample size of several thousand. My actual accuracy, with whitelisting factored in, is a little higher. My corpus is 44,000 junk words and 32,000 good words.

[Mitch Wagner]

So I ended up switching to POPfile on Monday, and I'm glad I did; it's much more accurate and it learns faster than PocoMail's own spam filters.

Based on your suggestions, I use PocoMail's built-in Junk Mail filter and other filters for whitelisting. That way, I'm protected against false positives. Moreover, I've set up a separate Quarantine folder for e-mail that isn't on my whitelist, and that POPfile thinks is ham, and that way I don't see any spam at all in my in-box.

I found it somewhat tricky to make the X-POPfile-Link header easy to click on for reclassifying purposes, but I was able to figure it out, and will be happy to pass the information along if anyone's interested.

[gavinjb]

I would be interested in knowing how you made the X-Popfile-Link header easy to click on for reclassifying

[rosscassell]

You can display the X-Popfile-Link as part of the short headers by adding it into Column setup under Tools>Options>Reading mail>index columns..

Then highlight it, copy to clipboard, launch browser and paste..

Too much work

You could on a message toggle to long headers, scroll down to the X-Popfile-Link header and you can see a clickable link.

What I did was modify a script and put a button on the toolbar to call it..

--
set $popfilelink-Header "X-Popfile-Link:"

Readheader $url $popfilelink-Header %message

Execute $url
--

I used Mark Breault's Launch Url script to modify.

This seems the quickest way.

[user777]

People should really be using POPFile. Multiple classification folders (buckets). Barca/Pocomail's junk filtering system keeps on placing my mails in the wrong folders, which is horrible. So with Popfile, do this:

1. classify your mails based into separate folders/buckets.
2. use pocomail's filters to place them in ur specific folders.
3. use popfile - link standard by ross to reclassify mails.

i'd also recommend using spamassassin if u have that feature in ur server.

ps. i have about 45 folders in barca/pocomail. 19 buckets in popfile. i don't use magnet/whitelists in popfile ('cause that would prevent popfile from training adequately). I use whitelist only in pocomail.