On Fri, 2005-06-10 at 08:06 -0700, James Bucanek wrote: > Greetings, > > 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. :)
I have SA (plus spamass-milter to reject, but that's not important for this discussion) on a bunch of servers at various client sites. All of them except one just flat stop spam. Period. Those clients are just tickled pink with the results. The one client who does not allow me to use Razor, Pyzor and DCC (they won't open their firewall) is very dissatisfied with the solution. It is incredibly frustrating. So my answer to you would be to install those three helpers and make sure that you have a recent Net::DNS installation. You will see accuracy go *way* up. Thomas
