Most spam products score messages as spam or ham based and produce a normalized score from 1 to 100.  Most spam products also usually produce a score distribution that looks like a bell curve--most of the scores are clustered in the middle of the range.  This means that you can never get rid of false positives and false negatives.  The actual text analysts algorithms are the root cause of the problem.  So you can tweak it forever and it will never be right: automation versus accuracy.

Proofpoint, however, doesn't have this problem.  Their level of certainty is much higher and spam scores are 'polarized' so that most scores fall at the extreme end of the range: a valley not a bell curve.  This means that it's actually easy to adjust the score threshold and get really accurate results.

Ron
 
 
 
 
 

Dan Crain wrote:

 What is the best Spam filter on the market?Right now I use GFI which does a really good job of sending stuff to a junk mail folder, ready for the but?, but the partners here don't want to spend time going through that folder looking for legitimate emails. Go figure! Right now they are looking at off sight spam filtering. Any opinions on that? Suggestions?Any thoughts or ideas would be helpful.Thanks.DanDaniel A. CrainSystems Administrator201 East Pine Street, Suite 1200Orlando, FL 32801Phone: 407-422-4310DanC@xxxxxxxxxxxx 

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