Defensio: Outsmarting Evil Spam

We reached a minor milestone over the weekend: Defensio processed its 100,000th spam message. Sure, when compared against Akismet’s millions of spam caught everyday, this may seem insignificant; but given that we’ve not yet even opened up the doors to our service, we’re more than encouraged by the results so far.

Perhaps most encouraging of all is the performance we’re seeing. Average accuracy across our beta testers currently stands at 99.5%, with many of the highest volume sites seeing recent accuracy rates around 99.9%. While it’s hard not to like those numbers, we’re happier still at the fact that they continue to climb everyday, as our learning algorithms keep improving - and this, despite the limited size of our data set. All this to say that we feel we’re on the right path, and we’ll continue to make strides in the weeks to come.

So a big thanks to everyone that is participating in our private beta, and to everyone else: sit tight, our public launch is not far off now.