Hello Diane,

Tuesday, August 3, 2004, 12:23:04 PM, you wrote:

d> Thanks for the tips. I may ask you later about your cheating method.  ;)

d> As for configuration, I can do:
d> blacklist
d> whitelist
d> required hits
d> rewrite subject
d> score
d> subject tag

d> Is that all you can do at your host Bob?

Without cheating, yes. Not sure what you many by "subject tag", though,
unless that's the same thing as rewriting the subject.

First thing I did last year when I first discovered I had SA capabilities
and read the SA web site was increase my required hits to 9 (I'm what
you'd call conservatively aggressive -- I hate spam, and nuke all spam so
my end-users don't see them (with a 99.8% accuracy rate), but I hate
false positives even more, so I increased the required hits to make sure
I didn't get any false positives from the default system.

I then increased a number of scores on the safest and most commonly hit
rules to allow for that increased required hits.

I then grabbed the blacklist William Stearns maintains at
http://www.stearns.org/sa-blacklist/sa-blacklist.current.cf
It's a big help, and I update my copy here from his system every month or
so.

I also have a few whitelists, but I try to keep those to a minimum.

All of that got me to around 98% accuracy.  I then began to cheat, and
that's how I get to 99.8%.

d> The servers are Linux and I have dabbled in Unix a few times in the 
d> last 10 years or so.

So it's very possible some adaptation of my system will work for you.
Basic requirements are that you be able to create secondary/intermediate
mailboxes, and run cron jobs to handle automated sa-learn and
spamassassin runs.

d> The misguided spams have slowed down since yesterday but were 
d> completely out of control Sat - Mon.

Never had a problem here.  Apparently my system headed them off.

Bob Menschel



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