Spam assassin: useless?

[Scientifik]

I tried a little experiment over the last few hours. I lowered my spam assassin rating to 4/delete and let my email address sit for a few hours. I have attached a screen shot of my inbox via @mail; I blurred out the subject lines because they were so sexually explicit I figured the Admins would delete this post. Also note the timestamps on many of the emails. I've had quite a few gripes about this, no major complaints but it is something that almost all of my customers have brought up from time to time. My question is, is this a problem with spam assassin not being an adequate filter? Or am I just unlucky.

[Dean]

The last few hours would not be the most representative of SpamAssassin's normal filtering. We changed out the hardware on SA to something a little beefier, so SA filtering was spotty between 3-5.

[admin]

What time did those emails "really" come in? I think SA is up on the new hardware now, so it should be good now if it is..

[admin]

Yep new hardware in for SA, try it now and see how it looks.. Should be catching more than ever now with new hardware.

[DigitalSkyline]

I've had mine set at 3 for some time now... only rarely do i get false positves... when this happens I add the sender to the white list. Still some spam finds its way through but mostly it works great.

[Scientifik]

Taking into account the hardware upgrade for spam assassin, I let my email address sit for a while to see what would happen. Please note this isn't a Vortech criticism its really more of a problem with SA. I have attached another screenshot of from @mail, this is from a few minutes ago. This mailbox isn't one that gets too much traffic, 10 spams/day isn't too bad but there are some higher volume customers that are probably getting 4 - 6x this much spam. What I find interesting is that these don't appear to be "near misses", how can SA miss a subject line like: "Young russian graceful virgins hardcore stunning pics and movies." (That's a direct copy & paste) Are there any other things that can be done (serverside, before my customers see them) that can cut down on spam?

[mresell]

Are we going to get SSL back on @mail?

[dpyers]

There's just to much day to day variation in spam to make the determination based upon a few hours. I think the only way to really determine if it's useless or not would be to turn it off for a week and then on for a week and compare your spam counts. Even then, there's variation. One week it's mortgage spam, the next week it's young sluts.

[Ballyhoo]

I'd like to second the SSL

[DigitalSkyline]

I'd thrid that... why was it was removed in the first place?

[admin]

The SSL I don't think was meant to be removed, in spliting up the web servers, I think it might have been forgotten, we can add a snakeoil cert back so SSL will work again.

If Aaron gets cought up today I am sure he would not mind adding that.

https://webmail2.hsphere.cc is online with a self signed cert. If all goes well for a day or so on it I will upgrade webmail1 as well.

Please report SSL errors (only on webmail2) to support via the ticket system.

[joshcombs]

I installed spamassassin on my server last night and it has helped out tremendously! I love it

[TonyK]

Spamassassin is fine but I can’t see my self allowing some software to decide which email is important to me or not, so I’m still getting the same number of emails only now I get double including the ones tagged as spam. So I’m worst off with spamassassin and I don’t have the time to play with all the white list black list thing, all I do is select delete.
I found lately the bulk of the spam subject is labeled as “software, account, shop,etc.” do you really want spamassassin to decide if an email is from a prospective costumer or spammer.
I had many emails from clients tagged as spam, that’s way we don’t empty the deleted items folder until the end of the day. The way I see it is, no software will do my job as I see fit, so now spam is part of my job description!

[DigitalSkyline]

I certainly don't recommend the Delete option... that would be unwise. I tag the subject lines, and use outlook to move the tagged messages to the deleted folder, which I manually review before actually deleting.

With the settings I use only rarely do I get a false positve and the deleted folder only requires a quick scan to see by the subjects that they are spam.

It saves me a lot of time... 200+ spams a day in the inbox really kills productivity. It allows me to ignore the noise and get right to the important emails.