[Gllug] Testing spam filter

[Tim Porter]

Sure,

The situation is/was that I've set up Spam Assassin many times before
and not had any issues with it. I never bothered to activate it on one
particular domain that I have because said domain gets little or no
spam.

A week or so ago I decided to finally activate SA on this domain and
since then I stopped getting emails from one of my customers, every
email I sent to the domain from other addresses was delivered properly
but no sign of emails from the customer. No sign of them in the junk
folder either, in fact, no spam in the junk folder at all.

Worried that I had managed to make a mess of SA somehow and had sent the
spam messages into an electronic black hole somehow, and with no way to
test this easily, I sent out that message to the list.

The customer emailed last night to apologise for not getting in touch
for ages. It went straight to the inbox. Typical.

I guess the setup is working as I used exactly the same process as I did
for my other domains and they all work fine. I guess it would be fairly
easy to get some known spams and pump them through it in order to test
but this wouldn't really test anything like SPF checks, known bad IP
ranges, etc.

Anyway, I consider this issue resolved now but I am still interested to
know if there is a good way of properly testing any spam filter, or as
people seemed to suggest, if just checking it manually really is the
best/only option?

Cheers,

Tim.

On Sun, 2009-03-08 at 12:08 +0000, John G Walker wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 8 Mar 2009 10:46:58 +0000 Dylan <dylan at dylan.me.uk> wrote:
> 
> > On Sunday 08 March 2009, t.clarke wrote:
> > > "If you don't get any spam, its working....."
> > >
> > > what about 'false positives' where the filter rejects genuine maiol
> > > as spam?
> > 
> > Have the filter sandbox the spam and check it manually until you are
> > sure it's working properly (or to your satisfaction)
> > 
> > Dx
> > 
> > >
> > > Tim
> > 
> > 
> > 
> 
> You'll need to do this to get rid of false negatives as well.
> 
> This discussion is a bit abstract, since you've not said which spam
> filter you're using. They all work differently and all need different
> strategies. which strategy to use will also depend on your own use of
> email.
> 
> So could we have some details please, and then we can help,
> 
> -- 
>  All the best,
>  John

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