Andy wrote > I am writing this rather long message in hopes that I might get at least > one > cogent response to a very nagging problem and situation that involved > Spam Assassin. > > > I have asked repeatedly for a reason why two near duplicate pieces of > spam, coming in at the same time, one went into the Spam folder, and the > other went into the Inbox.
First, let me say I feel some of your pain with increased SPAM. I readily admit I know very little about SA but in the last few days I have gained a significantly better understanding of the steps that are necessary to reduce spam. The way I gained this knowledge was through this forum and the help from others! I have learned a number of lessons (hopefully correctly). 1. All emails are not equal. I get serveral copies of the "Notice to Appear" emails every day. Some go into the spam folders, others do not. Spammers are smart, they change the content and headers (which are not always visible with email clients) to try to fool the spam blockers and are usually a step ahead of me. Until you look at the raw message and run it through some of the SA tools, you won't really know what is sending one message to spam and allowing another. 2. The number of spam messages has skyrocketed in the past months. I used to get a few a day, now I get about a 100 and I don't even have an email account that is very public. Just in the past few weeks I went on vacation and couldn't believe how many junk mails had come in. Until I get SA trained better, I will still get them. 3. Which brings me to - learning about what is really spam. For the past several days I have made a point of taking all the messages that I think should be spam and running them through the sa-learn tool. I may be mistaken on this process, but I think this is the way to impact the scores the best with the least effort. 4. I am trying to understand all the various extra rules/tools/spam lists I can use to see if any are of benefit. There were some suggested here already. 5. I am trying to be very careful how I use my own email on other websites. When I need to sign up for some website that I am not 100% sure of, I get a throw away gmail (or other) email account. I can always nuke it if it looks like the website was just a email address collector. Many spam emails come because of some past behaviour. Andy wrote > I would appreciate any insights anyone can offer to me, or for that matter > to Lunarpages because I'm not clear that even they understand what is > going on, nor how to fix this very nagging problem. I looked at Lunarpages and what control you have over SA. I can only see that you can change the score and populate a whitelist and blacklist. I maybe wrong (I don't think I am) but that is nowhere near enough administrative control to make an impact on changing SA's behaviour. I don't see anyway to train SA (sa-learn) to know what is really spam. If you want to take control, you are probably going to have to go somewhere else. I have my own website and email processing just because I haven't found a place where I can actually control all the various aspects of running a website/email. I wish you luck but I think you are not going to get much further with spam with the environment you are in. You have a difficult decision ahead with many options. I wish you success but don't get down on SA because of the lack of tools given to you. -- View this message in context: http://spamassassin.1065346.n5.nabble.com/Spam-Assassin-does-it-work-or-not-tp110809p110840.html Sent from the SpamAssassin - Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
