Junk Filter Not Aggressive

the customer control panel warns that the junk filter is "fairly aggressive" and good mail will get caught. well, as of this writing, i would have to disagree. if anything, the filter is catching only a small amount of junk. some of the most common spam like pump and dump stock quotes score 0.0 by spamassassin.

is anyone else using the built-in junk filter? my previous host's junk filter worked very well with zero configuration (but their panel sucked).

why doesn't DH update spamassassin more "aggressively?"

I'd have to agree with this. Spam Assassin is catching about 10% of my spam, and has not caught any of my legitimate email at all.

The DH version of SpamAssassin is *really* weak for me. It's not close to the latest version of SpamAssassin. An upgrade is in the suggestion list, but it apparently hasn't hit the vote or attention threshold for DreamHost to upgrade it. I keep hearing that DH's SpamAssassin configuration is quite complex, and an update would be quite an undertaking.

For now you can do the Gmail double-pass, which works very nicely:
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Double-Pass_Spam_Filtering_with_Gmail

-Scott

Our Spamassassin setup is not great at the moment and we know it. We have recently been adding more firepower to the set of junkmail filter servers and that should allow us to add on some more rules that will hopefully make it more reliable.

We've been letting it languish for awhile but some updates should be coming pretty soon.

- Dallas
- DreamHost Head Honcho/Founder