Showing the score in the UI.

Just a thought,

In order for someone to make decision at how low or how high they should set up the policies, it might be a good idea to show the score of legit mails.

Since some spam still do get through, knowing their score at a glance (as with the mails already junked) would help, since blacklisting sender is not a really valid option.

Otherwise, spam assassin has shown good reliability for me so far (one spam got through, 3 legit senders were blocked (3 newsletter in HTML i receive), all viruses got washed out, about 50 spams were blocked in my mailbox). Far better than Razor ;). I'm waiting from feedback from the other users @2038.net, but so far the test seems conclusive.

Yeah, that's a good idea. I've got a laundry list, I'll add that. It's not totally simple to do, but shouldn't require a ton of effort.


nate.

I'm also truly impressed by the awesome effectiveness of this new filter. With extremely low filter values, I've had 2 false positives and 2 false negatives, out of many hundreds filtered correctly. Good score = Good job, Nate!

On topic: The false positives got a rating of 0.5, and the lowest true spam has a rating of 3.0, so I'd say if you set your filter around 1 or perhaps preferably 2 then you'll get pretty good results.

Assuming these are normal SpamAssassin scores (I think they are), most people probably don't want to set the scores that insanely low, unless they want to spend a lot of time whitelisting and / or risk junking legitimate mail. It's something that all users will want to experiment with... but anything less than 4-5 seems like a bad idea to me - even failing a single test could result in someone's mail getting filtered.

I guess I should probably sign up for this beta test, eh....

Will, you're absolutely right, such low filter values are (close to) insane. But I'm doing it on purpose, to be on the leading edge with respect to the users of my domain. I'd rather learn the misfilterings myself than hear it from them.

I have the values set so low because that's the only way I can see the ratings of the mails -- right on topic, by the way -- and I am learning that even very low filter values aren't as insane as we thought. You can have the filter as low as 2 and still get really normal filtering out of it. Values of 0 to 1 are not as reliable and only for people like me

> Assuming these are normal SpamAssassin scores (I think
> they are), most people probably don't want to set the
> scores that insanely low, unless they want to spend a lot of
> time whitelisting

FWIW, when I used to use SpamAssassin I had excellent results with mine set to 2. I did whitelist some addresses, and while I filtered based on the score I did give a quick look over everything it caught before deleting, though.

It's possible some peoples' email usage/profile may make a certain threshold good for one person and not another.

I think the trick with spam filtering is to find your own comfort zone. I know that _I_ would rather have 100 false negatives if it means I don't get one particularly damaging false positive. That said, even my pretty low threshold was pretty accurate at the time.

- Jeff @ DreamHost
- DH Discussion Forum Admin

I have the impression the anti-spam thing uses SpamAssassin.

Does the installation support the ~/.spamassassin/user_prefs file? If so, you can add this:

subject_tag [Spam?] [_HITS_]

Changing the subject tag like this would also be a minimal-effort way to implement it site-wide.

It uses SA, but not the commandline or daemonized SA. Amavis loads the SA perl modules directly. You can't do per-user pref files (all the prefs are stored in a database). And SA itself doesn't do any message transformation, Amavis does it.

That's all done because SA is really inefficient and scanning a lot of mailboxes takes a huge amount of computing resources.

So there's no option of adding the score to the subject. Amavis supports adding a string, but it's only configurable site-wide. We've got it adding **DHSPAM** if you enable subject tagging.


nate.