Forwarding to despamchecker

[#1]

I have been religiously forwarding hundreds of spams to the despamchecker address for months.
With the imminent implementation of postini, is there any point in continuing to do this? Will the data from forwarded spam emails be taken forward into postini, or am I wasting time and bandwidth sending these emails on at this time?

[#2]

As far as I know there aren't any plans to remove the DSPAM software and this should still be trained throughout the postini implementation. We'll advise people if this is to be removed at any point.
Hope that helps,

[#3]

OK if I know it's not a wasted effort I will continue to do this.

[#4]

If you are Postini then the latest news is that next week DSPAM will be disabled and the tagging will be based on the Postini scoring:

Quote from: Bob

Next week when we actually introduce the subject line tagging ...

So for anyone on Postini already I'd say forwarding to despamchecker was pointless.
For anyone not on Postini I'd recommend requesting being moved across as the identification of spam by Postini is far more accurate than DSPAM.
I get the feeling that within the next two or three weeks everybody will be moved over to Postini anyway, whether you consider forwarding emails for the limited time left is up to you.

[#5]

I thought everyone was being moved to postini this week and next. I decided earlier not to go on the postini trial because I had read reports of false positives, but last week I put in my request to move.
jelv - what you are saying conflicts with the earlier PlusNet response from orbrey. They are saying that DSPAM is not being turned off.
I wonder why they would bother to run DSPAM is postini is apparently so wonderful.

[#6]

If you click on the "Quote from" on the extract from Bob's post above it will take you to the (long) post where he made that statement. As Bob practically eats, drinks, sleeps Postini at the moment, I think he is more aware of what will he happening and when than orbrey.
Here's a fuller quote of what he said:

Quote from: Bob

Postini as you will be aware, is very much a proprietary system. This means that there isn't really an easy answer to some of your questions. Some genuine email will always be marked as spam and the reasons for this could be down to any one of a number of factors. That's not to say that we don't have the ability to help train the Postini system as there is a process in place whereby we can forward emails to them for inclusion in their detection engine. We're planning on replacing the @despamchecker.plus.com addresses before long so that customers have an avenue via which they can report false positives/negatives to us. Obviously we can't allow direct communication between Postini's engine and the customer due to the potential for abuse, however we are committed to providing the best possible solution to you and the rest of our customers. Another thing that we're working on (as I write this), is to change the current scoring mechanism for Postini. At the moment Postini considers anything that scores below 0.3 to be spam. What we're looking to do is widen the scope of this by introducing scaling. This will allow us to offer something like 5 different levels of spam scoring (X-pn-pstn: Spam 1, X-pn-pstn: Spam 2, X-pn-pstn: Spam 3 etc.) Once the development work's done, we hope to make available portal controls that customers can use to decide at what level they want their emails tagging as [-SPAM-]. It is just time, and the need to deploy a solution that have not allowed us the opportunity to have this extra functionality in place already. Next week when we actually introduce the subject line tagging it's likely that we'll reduce the spam threshold so it's not as agressive. We should however have the header scaling in place so people like Jelv can continue to do their own filtering. Things are also getting better throughout the industry, and with the backing of Google I am sure Postini will improve their detection accuracy over time. Besides, Postini's detection rate is undoubtedly more accurate than what we currently have in place with Dspam.

[#7]

It's true, Bob certainly does know more about the postini plans than I do and given that  all free-online and force9 accounts have been moved over I expect plusnet to be joining them soon. I'm still not aware of a date for DSPAM to be switched off though.

[#8]

Like you, jelv, I currently have pn spam checking turned off to avoid contention with the postini headers. Presumably, once spam checking is finally moved from DSPAM to Postini we will need to switch it back on if we want subject-line tagging? Will someone from pn tell us as soon as this move happens? At the moment, the timetable is very vague....

[#9]

I anticipate turning it back on as soon as the Postini tagging is enabled as well. I guess it will be pretty obvious in here when it happens because, good or bad, we'll all be discussing how well it's working!

[#10]

I hadn't seen that post from Bob, that is very useful to know.
I think I will forget about DSPAM....

[#11]

I did weeks ago!

[#12]

Me too

[#13]

The scaling and the Postini subject line tagging (and turning off of Dspam) should be happening for those on the new platform next week. Subject to change, but early Tuesday morning is likely