David T-G wrote: > I know that there are a lot of folks using various spam-fighting tools > here, and particularly some who are using Spam Assassin, and so I > thought this might be of interest. I haven't checked into SA or how > it's configured or looked [recently] at the SpamTricks article, but > I'd like to know how much of this guy's claim is bupkus and how much > is valid. Maybe I'll get to dig into it. > > Surf on over to > > http://www.talkbiz.com/assassin.html > > and give it a read.
man that man is an idiot. i spent the time composing a response to him and then realized.... "why bother". personally, i wouldn't listen to his ideas on _anything_ after reading that. the fact of the matter is that spamassassin works. i personally wouldn't use it to bounce messages, although if the score is high enough, i'd probably feel safe doing that too. i wouldn't use it in a general purpose ISP situation like the one he describes unless i was just tagging mail and letting people make their own decisions. some of the tests that the filter uses *do* seem a little silly - but they generally are pretty good at telling what's spam and what isn't. i don't generally receive legitimate mail with A WHOLE LINE OF YELLING, or in HTML format only with no plaintext version. the actual scores are (from what i understand) taken from a script which looks through peoples spam folders (as mbox files) and determines what score something should get. thus, there are some things that you'd intuitively think should be scored a lot that are actually a negative score, while other things are scored higher than you'd think. it generally takes several tests to get a message blocked. in any event, sorry to continue this OT discussion. if you haven't already, definitely check out spamassassin. i was a long time spambouncer user, but i have to say i've been converted. -- Will Yardley input: william < @ hq . newdream . net . >
