SpamAssassin rules not very useful

[antic]

I'm finding one major drawback to using SpamAssassin - you can't create rules which filter spam based on content. You can only filter based on a sender's email address. That is, unless I'm missing something.

Back in the old days, filtering by email address would have been useful, but now there so much spam which comes from spoofed or random addresses, it's fairly meaningless.

I've ended up changing my mailboxes to mail forwards to my Yahoo account, which has good spam filtering and they now allow you create filter rules based on content of body, subject line, etc. That seems to work better, unfortunately.

[DVHost]

BroadbandReports.com just launched an email service for which they are accepting Premium Members as beta testers. I was lucky enough to get in and they are using SpamAssassin.

I was surprised to see an implementation like this but they have made it so that you have greater control over its functionality with modifyable scores so you can set your own scores for individual tests performed. It was interesting to see. A few other features as well that I dont recall seeing in our implementation of it.

[cambodia]

can we suggest this features in psoft.net forum ? i got alot of email everyday however i'm using norton internet security but i still got some new spam email nearly everyday

[Light Speed]

In CPanel there is filtering by body content. It's just not part of Spam Assassin

[Brangwyn]

I've found the new Junk filter in outlook 2003 to actually be quite outstanding .. I would have to say easily very close to 99% of all spam its catching straight out of the box.

[mresell]

Well I have said this before. Pegasus has every configurable rule or way to filter imaginable. There will always be something sliding by unless you do like hp did and have a white list only. I actually do this on the client side for some email addresses.

Originally Posted by cambodia

can we suggest this features in psoft.net forum ? i got alot of email everyday however i'm using norton internet security but i still got some new spam email nearly everyday

Err... Our implementation of SA into Hsphere is our own. Not Psoft's. Psoft's implementation only lets you setup white lists, black lists, and a "aggressive" setting - which translates to a number, but they use words like 'very aggressive' and 'not very aggressive' rather than giving you actual numbers

[dpyers]

I only get about 1500-2000 emails a week to my client pc. Between Outlook 2003 Junk Rules, and Norton Anti-Spam, only have a max of 2 or 3 spams hit the inbox each week. Most weeks, it's 0.

I have noticed that when I turn off Spam Assassin on an account, spam from that account that hits my PC triples.

Last virus to hit my machine was on 4/17. Get very few since clam was setup.

Only downside I've seen from Vortech's Spam/AV efforts has been that a forum I subscribe to got moved to a new server who's IP is on a spamhaus RBL so email from there is blocked. I consider that a small price to pay for the relatively clean stream of emails I get through Vortech.

About once or twice a month, someone contacts me to ask If I got their email - which I didn't. I tell them to resend it in plain text and it's always come through so far.

No Anti-Spam/Virus efforts are perfect and I know you guys get a lot of flack over yours, but just wanted to note that what you're doing works for me.

[antic]

I don't doubt SA blocks a great deal of stuff, but I still get unsolicited mail on my info@servicedomain.com account, about one every second day... which isn't much I know, but when you have a few email accounts going, you start wanting to minimise it any way possible.

These particular spam emails (usually trying to sell me logo design and search engine services) get through because they're simple and reasonable.

The only way to blat them is via content filters, so I now use email forwards instead of mailboxes, forwarding to a Yahoo account I've set up (that I can get POP access to), which gives me a lot more flexibility filter-wise than SA does, and seems to do the trick.

If SA just allowed adding of content filters, it'd be the biz.

P.S., if you want to set up a Yahoo account with POP access for free, just set up an Australian .au address (ie. blah@yahoo.com.au) - yahoo.com's cost money for POP access, but yahoo.com.au addresses allow it for free for some reason. Everyone loves us Aussies.

[dpyers]

I would imagine that Vortech has to make a trade off between the number of additional emails that would be caught and the overhead of applying a bayesian filter to every message that makes it through SA.

P.S. - The Aussie thing - it's that Crocodile Dundee/MadMax image.

Baynesian is a bit tough it the setup we have... Its best customized individually but takes up a lot of resources on a server, both disk and cpu.

As for forwarding to yahoo, I would watch out, yahoo will stop accepting messages in a flash.
We've had a number of incidents in the past few weeks with people doing exactly what you are - forwarding to hotmail, yahoo, etc. - which ends up causing more problems.
I've seen yahoo stop accepting mail for a particular mailbox, simply becuase that mailbox got some number of messages (100-500) in a day. This isn't a super high number of email, esp. for companies with formmails and such.
In the later case, sometimes yahoo/hotmail/msn/etc will just blacklist the entire server for a 'timeout' period of a couple hours... Mail goes through eventually, and not everything is halted (some other yahoo servers may let it through, it may be one particular domain yahoo is blocking, etc.), but its definitly an issue and I've had to send out more than warning email to people.
Just be careful if you're forwarding to an outside (free) email service... It isn't always worth it, esp. if it can get your account here in trouble.

[Brangwyn]

Unfortunately Bayesian isn't completely fool proof either, anyone notice in the last few months that many spam messages are starting off with either paragraphs of totally non related text or contain paragraphs of text in them .. this is to intentionally cause many of the so called intelligent learning based Bayesian filters to "skew" and allow some of the spam through

[mresell]

I have been getting those nonsense random word things for awhile. Very irritatiing

You can only write spam rules after the fact. For any given rule, a spammer will work hard to find a way around that rule. There is no way to "guess" what spammers will do or to make up rules based on spam messages that haven't been written yet. Fighting a constant battle, and the spammers always have the upper end :/

[dwhite]

Originally Posted by Bladesnitz

You can only write spam rules after the fact. For any given rule, a spammer will work hard to find a way around that rule. There is no way to "guess" what spammers will do or to make up rules based on spam messages that haven't been written yet. Fighting a constant battle, and the spammers always have the upper end :/

That is true, but with spammers, they seem to reuse a lot of the old stuff as well until its effectiveness goes down so far that its useless. So catching it early saves us all a lot of spam to deal with.

On a another note, is there a way to upload a bulk of spammer addresses to SpamAssasin? I have many that I've gathered over the last year or so in a file. I'd like to just upload it or cut & paste the list to SA, but do not see an option for it.

P.S. The latest Eudora mail client has a good Junk Mail filtering system on it now too. Plus it has had a nice filter management for quite some time which I've used to good effect.