Domo arigato Mr. Spamato

I came across a new Thunderbird extension a few days ago - Spamato. Not only is Spamato available as a Thunderbird (as well as Mozilla) extension, but it's also an add-on for Outlook. If you don't use any of these programs for e-mail, they also have a proxy that you can download and use with just about any other e-mail program.

Spamato uses the following filters to filter out spam:

• Bayesianato - your standard bayesian filter. Requires 100 ham and 100 spam e-mails to activate.


• Comha - a Collaborative Multi-Hash filter


• Domainator - a URL-based filter that queries Google for URLs/domains of a message. According to the number of Google results, messages are either marked as spam or ham.


• Earlgrey - this filter checks the URL on Spamato's servers to see if it is listed as spam. Jean Luc Picard not included.


• Razor - more information about this filter can be found at Razor's project site


• Ruleminator - apparently this filter is like "Spamassassin from the old days"

The current version of Spamato requires Java 1.5, which was more work to install than it should have been. Spamato includes charts and graphs so you can see how it is performing. So far, even though it has only been 4 days, Spamato has been giving me a 93 to 95% success rate, according to it's statistics. It has classified a few good e-mails as spam and hasn't caught a few pieces of spam. Still, I haven't gotten enough hams and spams to activate the Bayesianato filter yet and it feels like it is catching more spam than Thunderbird's junk mail filter (a bayesian filter) did. I'll probably stick with Spamato unless it feels like it is starting to not catch a lot of the spam that comes through.