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Tweaking SpamAssassin
Hi all,
I'm getting a lot of very obvious spam (viagra etc). SpamAssassin picks out about 80% but I'm wondering if anyone can suggest a way of picking up the other 20%. I've started looking up the IPs on www.dnsbl.info and none of them are blacklisted on any lists. One example is 95.154.246.239. They all show as spam score 8 - my current threshold is the default, 5. I want to avoid just increasing that number because email lost could be new business.
Ideas?
Thanked by 14n0nx
Comments
I gave up years ago, and just let Gmail do the work. lazy I know
I don't use Google, Dropbox, Facebook etc.
any specific reason to avoid gmail? if you don't mind the potential/real privacy intrusion, you can just use them as a relay - imap/pop3 to your own server
I'm OK with NSA scanning my emails
perhaps foolish, but I've nothing to hide. not yet anyway
I have good luck with postgrey and postscreen in addition to SpamAssassin.
But then postscreen would be useless if they don't show up on blacklist.
I hate ads. I hate targeted ads even more. I like to be in control of my data and my business, and make my own backups. I don't want to pay Google.
Some of my customers are security-conscious just as I am and some time ago, one, who was a researcher at a major infosec centre, commented on my MX records
It's just nice to be in control and avoid all of that.
Are you using razor/pyzor/dcc checks?
@Jar might have some pearls of wisdom for you
lurking
Yes. SpamAssassin is frequently stated as ineffective, and this is simply false. Spammers change more rapidly than SpamAssassin is updated, that is all. However, you can find the tests that are being set off by incoming spam and you can change the values that are added to the score for each test in the configuration.
Will post my current configuration in a bit
Here we go. This is what's in my local.cf right now: http://pastebin.com/qRJ5y4Cj
Really helpful, thanks @Jar
@jhadley we could offer you Spam Experts incoming protection in front of your mail servers, but that's hosted on-site with us. I promise though, we have no affiliation with the NSA, nor do we use any of your data to target any ads.
It would involve changing MX to our white labeled Spam Experts relay, I don't know if that's still acceptable for you though.
If you are interested just drop me a PM and we can work something out.
@Jar
I have implemented your SpamAssassin config - thanks for sharing
I wonder if you have made any updates to it since posting?
Still the same, interestingly enough. It's been working really well! For extreme cases, I've been setting up sa-learn crons for clients to train account specific filters, which has cut down on my tweaking of these rules just a bit.