[Cialug] SpamAssassin

[Jeff Davis]

I've had pretty good luck with it, but it's not
a silver bullet and doesn't claim to be.

Out of the box isn't going to catch a lot,
you'll need to tune it a bit because what
is spam to you may be ham for another person.

Typically I use the spamc/spamd implementation
with Postfix and allow per user settings.

I've added some extra tests and have written
custom scripts that get called by cron to
take advantage of the bayesian learning.
(Not all users want to help out.)
I have a Junk and NotSpam folder and my
script calls sa-learn with the proper
flags for me.

Adjusting the .cf files themselves to fine
tune scoring I find to be too time consuming.
I do turn down the threshold value a little.

I don't bother with RBL's at the SA level.
I do RBL's in my postfix config so that
they just get blocked and reduce the
overall load.  [If you're using mailgraph,
just be forewarned that this causes your
stats to be skewed.  RBL rejections then
show up in the rejected count instead
of the spam count.]

Currently only about 3% of what gets accepted
into my system is getting flagged as spam.
That probably seems low, but consider that
the Postfix UCE controls are rejecting 29.1%
of incoming mail.

I'll also mention this particular setup
isn't very old (~4 months) so I don't
have a large corpus built up yet.
(I could've given you better stats
from my last job where SA had been in place
for 2 years.)

I'm still using version 2.55 and haven't upgraded
to 3 yet mostly because its a low priority and
they changed the bayesian journals to a new
format so I'll have to convert them.

Version 3 looks very tempting though, it has
plugins for HashCash, RelayCountry, and SPF.

If I can get mail moved to a beefier box
I'll upgrade to 3 and probably do the RBL's
in SA so I have a more accurate SPAM picture.

If you're doing this for only one person
I'd suggest just using a mail client like
Thunderbird with a built in trainable junk
filter.  Its good experience though even
you set it up for one person.

Sorry if that's way more information than you wanted.

-Jeff



Stuart Thiessen wrote:
> I am working on setting up SpamAssassin and I was wondering if you would 
> be willing to share some of your experiences (positive and negative, 
> shortcuts and pitfalls) related to setting it up and getting it to work 
> right against spam.  I can get the installation information, etc from 
> the website, but I always like to find out the experience of other users 
> as they have worked with it.  Thought I would see what you all had 
> experienced.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Stuart Thiessen
> 
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