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SpamAssassin 3.0.0


jefft

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We've upgraded SpamAssassin on the mail filters to the recently-released 3.0.0 version. There are several new ideas added to the filters, so they should be more accurate than ever before. I'd like to hear any feedback from you as far as what they're catching, what they're missing, and whether you think the total percentage of spam caught is better now.

One interesting thing to do is to turn off all your DNS blacklists and run with SpamAssassin only for a while. This lets you see just how good these new filters are.

JT

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There've been many requests for additional add-on packages ... are any applied now, and what should the suggested answer be to answer those calls for the additional filtering models of these add-on requests?

17619[/snapback]

Spamassassin 3.0 includes many tests by default that were addons in SA 2.x.

The backhair, drugs and chickenpox rules that JT included from SARE are part of the 3.0 distribution.

The SURBL URI checks are part of the distribution now. I suspect that this was one of those often requested.

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There've been many requests for additional add-on packages ... are any applied now, and what should the suggested answer be to answer those calls for the additional filtering models of these add-on requests?

17619[/snapback]

At the moment, it's mostly stock SpamAssassin. As noted above, that includes more than it used to.

JT

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...I've just turned off all my DNS blacklists (including the SC DNSBl) and I'll be interested to see the results.

The results are quite good so far. Although I've not kept exact count of all the messages that have been "seen" by SA so far, out of 27 that were actually spam, 25 of them went straight into Held Mail with high scores (my setting is "5") and ony two managed to fool the tests and make it to my inbox. Of those two, one of the IPs was already on the SCBL, so if I had only that one selected (I'll add back all of my BLs after this test), it would have been 26/1 instead.

I've sent myself test messages from a variety of sources....POP accounts, Yahoo Mail, AOL webmail, Hotmail, and in each case, the score was below 1.0. The highest X-spam-Status I've seen on a desireable piece of mail so far is 2.2, which is a bit high, but I'll keep an eye on that.

DT

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Thanks for updating SpamAssassin JT! I know that many SpamCop mail users will appreciate the significant improvements that the SpamAssassin team have made in version 3.0.

My favorite improvement is SURBL checking and it is fitting that SpamCop mail users who report websites in spam via SpamCop will now directly benefit from this action by contributing to at least one SURBL.

A suggestion to SpamCop mail users who have their SpamAssassin thresholds set very low (at 1, 2, or 3 perhaps), I believe that it will be wise to raise your threshold up to 4 or 5 since SpamAssassin 3.0 will be more effective than you were used to. You may find that with a higher setting for your SpamAssassin, you can still effectively filter the spam while hopefully not having to whitelist.

I think I will test the new SA out and turn off my other mail filtering and sorting for the time being.

Way to be on top of upgrading JT, afterall it was only released yesterday!

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Well, my test is over and I have re-enabled all the DNSBL's.

As I have found in the past, DNSBL's are better than any content filtering scheme out there. While I normally get only 2-3 messages a day through the combination settings, in the last 24 hours, I received 9 by using the SpamAssassin setting only at the default of 5. Any lower, in my experience stops too many legit messages.

Here are the scores of the messages as they came in:

2.6 Makes You Wonder...

0.3 How one can become a terrorist?

3.4 Stevenu, save! the BERND!!

0.4 September NFL Partner Playbook

0.4 Autoreply: Re: Hi

4.7 Welcome to www.dumpsmarket.ws

1.2 Fill Out Surveys and Win Cash!

2.0 Important Message about carrier pickup from the U.S. Postal ...

4.9 your life could be bigger strauss

As you can see, changing the setting to 4 would have stopped only 2 more and even a 1 would have let the same number (3) through that I normally experience.

P.S. I still received my total ~100 spam messages over the 24 hours.

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Well, my test is over and I have re-enabled all the DNSBL's.

I think I'll end my test now also. Here are my results (in brief):

169 total spams processed by SA alone

6 of those scored less than "5" so were allowed through

some of those would have been caught by the various DNSBLs, but SA did a very good job, IMO

Thanks again to JT for the upgrade!

DT

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