On Mon, 12 Jan 2004, Carl Chipman wrote: > What do most people who write new SA rules set their threshold too? I had > set it around 3.0 for our company, but the false positive rate was very > high. I was looking at some of the big-evil stuff and noticed that many of > the scores were 3.0 by themselves...
I run with a threshold of 4.5; my wife runs with a 5.0. Some of the folks who avail themselves of SpamAssassin at a little ISP I donate time and adin skills to range from 4.0 (rather dangerous, in my opinion) to about 6.5; one guy wants to auto-delete at 10.0, but we've been cautioning him against it. If you're running SA for personal reasons, and can control the the rules that it runs with, you can pretty much set your score threshold to whatever you want. For instance, in my case, I have several tests that gently bias the default score downwards for the type of mail I receive from friends and acquaintances so the low threshold of 4.5 is rarely a problem. (Lists I'm on bypass SA, as do the lists my wife is on.) If you're running SA at an ISP level, you *really* should be looking at per-user configurability, not just for white-/black-lists, but also for threshold settings and rule overrides. The MySQL interface is marvelous for that, and there are web-interfaces for it that can be customised to give users the control they need (and deserve) to have over the scoring and thresholding process. There is a fundamental problem with low thresholds -- you're runing out of numbers as the threshold gets smaller, and minor changes can cause profound behavioural changes in the filter. Try going from 4.0 to 3.9, for instance, and watch the differences! Personally, I find that a 4.4 would be too low for my tastes and would introduce false- positives so I stay at 4.5 and craft custom rules to downward-bias the occasional bit that gets bagged incorectly. Cheers. +------------------------------------------------+---------------------+ | Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin) | West Boylston | | Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast | Massachusetts, USA | | mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] +---------------------+ | http://users.rcn.com/crfriend/museum | ICBM: 42:22N 71:47W | +------------------------------------------------+---------------------+ ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Perforce Software. Perforce is the Fast Software Configuration Management System offering advanced branching capabilities and atomic changes on 50+ platforms. Free Eval! http://www.perforce.com/perforce/loadprog.html _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
