[Sderby] Re: Spamassassin

[James Gibbon]

This didn't make it onto the list for some reason, so here's a
retry:

On Thu, 21 Jul 2005 17:14:07 +0100 (BST)
slh at f2s.com wrote:

> Hi All
> time to blow the cobwebs off this mailing list
> 
> Spamassassin
> I know people use it, but how exactly?
> I've got it set up, and it appears to be scanning mail, adding stuff
> in the headers, that wort of thing.
> But once its been flagged as spam, what do you do with it?
> do you just kill it? or dump it in a folder somewhere for later
> perusal i intend to keep all mine, only at first, so i have a pile to
> help SA learn, and also to make sure its not getting any legit emails
> 

I've stopped using Spamassassin since virgin started filtering
junk mail, since that was where over 95% of mine came from - so
I haven't used it for over a year.

I used it in conjunction with procmail / sendmail, set up so that
only mail that wasn't addressed to mailing lists was checked.

What you do with your spam is up to you! Most people will not 
want to delete it on sight, since there's a risk that legitimate
mail will have been flagged as spam. It's best to divert it to
a separate junk folder, which you then scan through at regular
intervals. 

Although it might appear to defeat the purpose when you're looking
through it anyway, in practice it's much less irritating when it's
been diverted to a separate folder that you look through once every
couple of days, and it's easier to delete it in blocks when it's
all in the same place - often it's very easy to recognise spam from
the subject line.

Actually, now I remember, I used to have two spam folders, one
for very-high-scoring spam (as you'll no doubt know, spamassassin
uses a scoring system to assign a degree of likelihood that each
mail it checks is spam). After a test period of a month or two in 
which I had no false positives in the high-scoring spam folder,
I set up procmail to discard it immediately. I like to live
dangerously ;)

James

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