> I consider myself a "weekend" spam assassin. I run my own > server (co-located), and have about a dozen users (mostly > friends and family, but a few paying customers). But running > a mail server isn't my day job. I don't run Razor or any of > the cooperative spam filters simply because I didn't have the > time to figure them out and set them up. > > I'm running Spamassassin 3.0.2 which I installed a few months ago. > > SA is still only catching about 50-75% of the spam. I've set > up Bayes learn ham/spam mailboxes, and I regularly feed them > 200 to 500 messages a day. Yet even after months of > training, I still get messages like this: > > Subject: (6/10/05) Mortgage Rate Report > X-Spam-Status: No, score=3.6 required=7.0 > tests=BAYES_99,HTML_80_90, > > HTML_FONT_TINY,HTML_IMAGE_RATIO_04,HTML_MESSAGE,NORMAL_HTTP_TO_IP, > OPTING_OUT autolearn=no version=3.0.2 > > As you can see, the Bayes filter has nailed it as spam, but > it still only gets a score of 3.6. > > I currently have my threshold set to 7.0. I've been > considering lowering it again (maybe to 5.0), but am paranoid > about false positives. I can go through my mailbox and see > ham that has scores of 3 or even 4. > > I was hoping that someone here could give me some quick > advice as to what I might be doing wrong, or point me to a > trouble-shooting site for SA. > > I was previously using a client-side Bayes filtering system > and was getting 99.8+% spam identification rates. SA has > been, so far, a bit of a disappointment and I'm sure it's my > fault. :)
Running SpamAssassin is more of an art than a science. You'll probably catch more spam by picking up most of the rules at: http://www.rulesemporium.com/rules.htm Bayes isn't scored terribly high in the default rule scorings. If you're diligently training bayes, you might find that increasing the score in local.cf would help you: For example: Score bayes_99 4.0 I run a mail server for a non-profit, so I don't get to spend too much time on it. With SA 2.5x and 2.6x we used a threshhold of 8 to drop spam. With SA 3.x, I had to lower the threshhold to 4 to catch the same amount of spam. It's fairly rare that we have FPs even at 4. HTH Bret
