Cerebrus update

Patches to version 1.2.5 are now up. Cerebrus will now not start up if another instance is already started. This may solve the problem for those who got into a loop downloading new patches. HTML comments are now stripped out in non multipart email ( they were already being stripped out in multipart base64 encoded html email etc ). And some statistics on the spam that I have received since November 2002. This is a breakdown of the ways Cerebrus has caught spam: No To Address: 28 No DNS: 126 Spamserver: 126 Forged Hotmail: 150 Content: 275 Bayes: 280 Forged Headers: 381 Spamcop: 420 Banned: 438 Header: 517 Subject: 997 Spamtrap: 1048 NoSubject: 4 Total spam 4790 since 1st November 2002 ( 42.8/day ) False -ves ( 1/week ) 16/4790 is .3% False +ves ( 1/fn ) 8/4790 is .15% Detection Rate is 99.7% the false -ves/+ves are not entirely accurate as I haven't kept figures, but this is my impression. False positives for me may be even less. I relaxed the criteria for what constitutes a forged email earlier this month, and this may lead to an increase in false negatives, and also fixed some bugs which may lead to a decrease in false positives. I am interested in stopping false positives as they constitute a type of programming error. If someone is experiencing a high rate, please let me know and I'll try and see why. -- Graham Chiu http://www.compkarori.com/cerebrus

I've built the experimental version 1.3.0 with the SDK and this is available at http://www.compkarori.com/cerebrus/cerebrus130.zip I'm hoping that there are no major bugs introduced and since the SDK has read/lines fixed, it should be quicker now in downloading email. Using Cerebrus will always be slower than using your email client, but the time saved in cleaning your email up if you get a lot of spam will more than make up for it. Apart from using the SDK for this build, there are the following changes: 1. Email sent from a mail server that lacks a DNS record will now always be flagged as spam unless the sender is in your allowed lists. 2. You no longer need the network.txt file, and a new installation does not drop to the console to build the network.txt file. The network settings are set up in the GUI configuration screen. And of course you can enter them in the email dialect. 3. Cerebrus will now backup the configuration file, and numbers them sequentially, before saving any new changes. Nearly losing the banned server list of several hundred spam server IP addresses was the incentive for this change. 4. Your statistics of spam vs ham are posted to the Compkarori/cerebrus site, and can be turned off in the modes setting ie. sendstatistics You can see my spam/ham statistics at http://compkarori.com/cgi-local/statistics.r and if you have a static ip address, you can see your own as http://compkarori.com/cgi-local/statistics.r?ip=ipaddress This doesn't tell you about accuracy, just the ratio of your email which is ham/spam. The funny looking icon at the top left is where I'm supposed to load an icon image :( -- Graham Chiu http://www.compkarori.com/cerebrus