David A. Desrosiers writes:
I did a very informal comparison of dspam to Spam Assassin, and found them to be about the same.
They are so dramatically different, I can't believe you even would suggest they're "about the same".
SpamAssassin is written in Perl, and is significantly slower than dspam. SpamAssassin also relies on static rulesets, not the "quality" of the mail received. You can't do per-user filtering with SA. With dspam, if one user prefers seeing lots of HTML advertisements, they can. Another user on the same system can reject those as spam.
I don't want this to turn this mailing list into a dspam vs Spam Assassin war, but I think your information about SA is out of date. SA v3 supports multi-tiered (e.g., global, domain, user) configurations, and has bayesian filtering as one of several rules for determining spam. I'd also like to point out that being written in Perl does not imply that something is always much slower than C, especially when large amounts of regular expression pattern matching is involved. Perl developers have spent a lot of time optimizing its pattern matching. The SA Wiki suggests that if you find that SA is slow, you should examine the rule set you're using, and disable inappropriate rules (for example, ones requiring DNS lookups). Bruce