[Jari Williamsson:]
>Brad Beyenhof writes:
>
>>SpamAssassin works very well, actually...
...
>>I got a ton of spam... and it was all but eliminated after I installed the
>>SpamAssassin POP3 proxy....
>
>Thanks for the tip! I installed SAproxy yesterday, and only one single
>spam mail wasn't caught (got a score of 3.4) and something like 120
>spam mails was caught - and no false catches yet.
False catches - do you mean flagging a legitimate message as spam?
If I could continue this off-topic thread (which we all seem to be
interested in again and again), may I ask a question about this, please?
I am getting more and more spam, and would like to do something about it if
I can do so safely - but I am concerned that any automated filters could catch
and throw out legitimate mail that I want to read. It may not happen often if
the program is very good at detecting spam; but I would feel that, until
programs can understand words and sentences in a human-like way, it *could*
occasionally throw out something I want to receive.
It appears this scoring system in SpamAssassin is designed to look for
features characteristic of spam generally, and I suppose a message is thrown out
if it gets over a certain score.
I wonder if someone could please point me to a web site that explains the
scoring system in more detail. If a message scores high enough to count as
spam, is it just deleted automatically, or just put in a subdirectory for spam
for you to review at will? Or can you set it either way?
Also, my service provider already scans incoming mail for spam and viruses,
and the system lets the e-mail through (but removes virus-infected attachments),
and flags them by inserting "{SPAM?}" or "{VIRUS?}" at the start of the subject
heading.
In that case, would a spam filter of my own that merely marks things or
moves them to a subdirectory really add anything to what my service provider
already does? And I have occasionally received legitimate mail that they
flagged as spam - so false positives in detecting spam are of concern to me if I
use a filter.
In the end, it seems you have to either trust some software to detect and
*throw out* spam without your okay, and take the risk it could be a legitimate
message; or else, however you filter or sort things, you have to put the spam
somewhere and inspect it visually, and press "Del" as appropriate. But I can
already do the latter without a filtering program - and it takes a bit of time,
though.
I seem to be suggesting that the filtering program is not really much use
unless you set it to delete spam automatically. Is it as simple as this?
If anyone can shed light on this, or at least point me to a site that
explains all this further, I would be grateful.
Thanks.
Regards,
Michael Edwards.
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