From: "Matt Kettler" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > At 12:20 PM 2/6/2004, Gareth wrote: > >I'm about to implement a SpamAssassin setup for nearly one hundred users, > >I'll be using Amavis-new, and so can't have Bayes per user.... should I > >avoid Bayes all together? > > No... Bayes performs better when it's per user.. that doesn't mean that > multiple-users on a single bayes DB doesn't work.
Would I still need to have sa-learn running on ham and spam, and making employees resend any original messages to a ham and spam mailbox in the event of a false positive / negative...?
Yes and no... You definitely need to have some sa-learning going on.. Getting direct feedback from your users is helpful but not always needed.
Usually FPs are newsletters, so I just set up a dedicated account that gets it's mail left on the server. I subscribe that account to the newsletters that are FPing and feed that account's mailbox to sa-learn on a daily basis.
> And you might want to load some of the custom rulesets like popcorn, > backhair, weeds, etc.
How do these custom rules work,
Different custom add-on rules do different things.
who writes them,
They're all written by different SA users (ie: I wrote antidrug.cf). Some are very good at it, some are a bit amature.
why are they not includedwith SpamAssassin..
Some aren't included in SA just because they are "too new" and were literally written since the last SA release that updated the ruleset. Others are kind of "non mainstream" and require regular updates (ie: bigevil, sterns's blacklist, etc).
Because of the GA process, well tuned and balanced scoresets take a while to build, so SA doesn't update the main ruleset rapidly (it takes about 4 weeks of computer crunching for mass-check and GA).
On the other hand, I can hand score a couple rules quickly and put them out today... drawback is that my hand-scored rules might have their scores mis-placed, and haven't been tested against the massive piles of spam in the corpus. The users of a custom ruleset have to trust the ruleset author to set scores well, or look at the rules and adjust them themselves.
As a detailed example, the story of antidrug:
Antidrug was recently submitted for inclusion in future versions, but right now it's an add-on. I was working on some "pill spam" rules to try to submit to SA when the whole pharmacourt/habeas debacle broke out. Since so many people were being affected by a barrage of spam from pill spammers (ie: pharmacourt) I released the not-quite completed ruleset to the public, figuring many users would benefit from "early access" to these rules.
. any 'How to' documents on setting them up?
SpamAssassin automatically parses *.cf in your /etc/mail/spamassassin directory, not just local.cf. Download a ruleset of your choice, copy it over, and run spamassassin --lint to make sure it's not broken.
A community site for add-on rules exists at:
http://www.exit0.us
