Johnny C. Lam wrote:

> receiving obvious spam thus far.  SpamAssassin's documentation claims to
> be very good at discriminating between spam and non-spam.  Has anyone had
> either good or bad experiences with spamassassin that they'd like to share?

I am using SA on my private computer (NetBSD 1.5.2, 1 user) for about
half a year. The score threshold was left at the default value and it is
invoked by procmail. I have experimented a bit with spamc/spamd but
don't use it regularly as the mail traffic is low and my main machine is
rather new and powerful enough for 'spamassassin -P'.
I have some local rules. Some are very specific (e.g. personal ebay and
amazon rules), some were contributed back to SA development (integration
pending).
DCC and Razor are disabled here and I don't have any experience with
them. Maybe I'll try those services in the future.

So far I have no bad experiences to report. It catches almost every spam
mail (no percentage available) with my score threshold of 5.
I have not added the netbsd lists to the whitelist and SA picks up most
of the spam that escapes the rules on the NetBSD server. There were
maybe less than 10 false positives from the lists, if I remember
correctly.

Recommendations:
Before you rely on SA, take a look through the score file
/usr/pkg/share/spamassassin/50_scores.cf, especially for rules with a
high score. Some people don't like scores with a value more than half
their threshold.
Addionally, rules using blacklists (rbleval:check_rbl.*) may not do
what you want. Either skip RBL rules entirely (set skip_rbl_checks  to 1
in your preferences) or give those rules you don't agree with a score of
0 (effectively disabling them).


ciao
     Klaus