Justin Mason wrote: > However: it's important for SpamAssassin developers and mass-checkers to > get a "representative" feed of spam -- with all kinds of spam included -- > so that the rules are measured against something close to reality. On a related note, we actually *stopped* using front-line RBLs as with them in place, we were no longer able to get true stats as to the actual flow of Spam/Ham into our sites. Which meant that we really couldn't tell how effective our antispam systems were being. The "broad axe" that is RBL meant that a single mail message coming from servers may be blocked dozens of times (as it retries), meaning that our stats would over-represent the effectiveness of front-line RBL methods. Now we just let it all hit SpamAssassin, and have simply upped the score on those RBLs we used to trust to reject directly, so that the Spam doesn't get any further. End result: no delivery changes - but better quality stats. Obviously you have to have over-speced your mail servers to be able to do this - something poor old Justin can't manage I think :-)
(FYI: picking a random user of ours and looking at all Internet email they received in Aug 2006 showed SA had >99% success rate at tagging Spam. 85% was quarantined (scores >10/5) and the rest tagged for the users to filter on. Also, ZERO ham misclassification - which is something certain commercial competitors to SpamAssassin are actually pretty bad at...) Now if only it could deal with this storm of "VIiiagra"/"VIragra" spam that has been sneaking in... :-) -- Cheers Jason Haar Information Security Manager, Trimble Navigation Ltd. Phone: +64 3 9635 377 Fax: +64 3 9635 417 PGP Fingerprint: 7A2E 0407 C9A6 CAF6 2B9F 8422 C063 5EBB FE1D 66D1
