Spam Assassin Changes? (Argon)

[baldtechnologist]

Have there been any changes made to Spam Assassin on Argon? All of a sudden normal e-mail is being labelled as spam. Really simple test messages included.

I sent one message that came from my work address, had the subject line 'test' and included a simple sig that had nothing that could be misconstrued as spam. Yet somehow Spam Assassin thinks it is. Here are the Spam Assassin-specific headers:
X-Spam-Report:
* 5.4 BAYES_99 BODY: Bayesian spam probability is 99 to 100%
* [score: 1.0000]
X-Spam-Status: Yes, hits=5.4 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_99 autolearn=no
version=2.63

There isn't any real information as to what might have triggered Spam Assassin to mark it as such.

[jason]

This has happened occasionally and has been discussed here before. I've never seen it myself, so I can't offer any insight. In fact, I was having the opposite problem for the past two days--no mail was marked as spam since yesterday morning. My last mail check yielded three marked messages, though, so it seems to have been fixed. Hopefully your problem will be fixed soon, too.

--Jason

[baldtechnologist]

Yeah, I've seen threads in the past and have even been able to solve previous problems by disabling and then enabling SA, but that didnt work this time.

Hrrrm...

[Joshua Clinard]

I enabled spam assassin for the first time last week on Argon. I then sent some important forwards to myself from another account, and they all were labeled as spam. So I had to turn it off. I figured that Spam Assasin labeled almost everything as spam. I took a look at the rules on the spam assasin web site, and they seem to include rules for blocking almost every peice of legitimate e-mail I get. Does anyone know of any better spam filter that I could use, because I need to get my real mail, but I get about 50 spam mails a day in one account I have.

[jason]

For me, SpamAssassin has been very helpful. Yes, there are a lot of rules, but a match to one of the rules doesn't mean an automatic block. Instead, each rule is given a score. When a match is made, that score is added to the total score for the message. When that reaches a threshold value, (5 is the default), the message is marked as spam. In addition, you can whitelist addresses that you know won't be sending you spam (such as your own), so that no messages sent from those addresses will ever be marked as spam.

With a little configuring and some patience SpamAssassin can become a great tool to filter your spam. I can't say it is the best out there because I haven't used anything else, but it suits my needs very well. No tool is going to be perfect out of the box, anything you try is going to take some time to get set to just the way you want it to work.

--Jason

[Joshua Clinard]

How do you gonfigure spam assasin to work differently? I just saw options to enable it or to disable it.

[jason]

There should be a third button on the CP page with the enable/disable buttons to configure it. Clicking that will give you a form to add things like whitelist and blacklist addresses, subject rewriting, and the like. It supports some of the most common options.

There are a ton of other options that you can set, too if you wish. You can do this by editing the .spamassassin/user_prefs file in your account's home directory. For a listing of the options available type

man Mail::SpamAssassin::Conf

(note: it's case sensitive) at an SSH prompt.

Good luck!

--Jason

[baldtechnologist]

I agree, Spam Assassin is a great help to me. My only problems have been a few blips where it decides to block far too much mail, and that seems to be solved when the support team gives it a good kick.

Mix SA with the e-mail filters to eliminate anything tagged with a certain score or higher and you can seriously cut down on the amount of spam that makes it to your in-box. Add a couple of filters within your e-mail program to sort out messages that are likely to be spam, but are under the deletion threshold and you have a powerful tool to cut down on the amount of junk hitting your eyeballs.

[Joshua Clinard]

So far in the 24 hours I have had it running, it has tagged no spam as spam, and 2 ligitimate messages as spam. SO I will be forced to turn it off. I set the level at 6, to make sure it didn't tag legitimate mail, and it doesn't tage anything but legitimate mail. I am wondering if something is wrong with it.

[baldtechnologist]

I've had good luck setting it at a level of tagging at 5. I then set up e-mail filters on the server to automatically delete anything that is marked with a 10 or above. It is a bit agressive, but these are all personal accounts, so I have little worry about something in a business e-mail triggering the deletion.

[Joshua Clinard]

Ok, I got Spam Assasin running properly, and it seems to be tagging correctly. Now can someone explain how to get it to move the tagged messages to the trash, or better yet, to bounce them to sender? I think I recall something about a fail method, but I don't know how to set it up.

[baldtechnologist]

Under 'Email Filters' in your control panel you can set up a new filter which looks at the X-Spam Status. I have a ton of them set up to look for 'hits=XX' where XX is a number. Then I tell it to discard the higher-tagged ones. So, for example to remove any spam rated as 16.2 or 16.9 I have:
$h_X-Spam-Status: contains "hits=16"
A couple of notes, you will need to set up a filter for each full integer, though if you use contains as I did above, you do not have to worry about anything after the decimal point. So, I have a filter set up for each number from 9 to 89 (I don't worry about 90 + as the filters for '9' and 10' will catch all of the 90's, 100's etc.)

I personally have it set up to delete anything with a 9 or above.

I have set up SA to change the subject of anything ranked at a 5 to include *****SPAM***** and have set up my e-mail client to react accordingly.

I hope this makes sense.