[clue-talk] Triaging spam

[Matt Gushee]

I've been thinking about how to more effectively deal with the flood of 
spam I get, and it seems to me that SpamAssassin's yes-or-no judgment is 
a rather crude mechanism, and a triage approach would be better. I mean:

   Some messages are definitely spam. Send them straight to /dev/null.

   Some messages are definitely not spam. Send them to the Inbox.

   Some messages might be spam. Send them to the maybe-spam folder.

This way, my inbox would be (cross fingers) free of spam, and the number 
of possible spam messages would be kept to a manageable level. Up until 
now I've been sending messages to a spam mailbox based on 'X-Spam-Status 
: Yes' ... but it's just getting ridiculous. I *think* it's been a long 
time since I've had a false positive, but with the number of messages 
going to my spam box, it's impossible to check thoroughly, and I don't 
do it often enough--I might as well just be discarding them all.

It seems like between the SA scores and procmail and the message 
headers, it should be possible to implement this approach. Has anybody 
done this? For deciding that a message is definitely spam, do you think 
the scores are enough? If so, where would you set the threshold?

Or would you rather use keywords (e.g. I strongly doubt that a 
legitimate sender will ever send me e-mail about my pen1s)? Or a 
combination?

Last but not least, anybody have procmail rules they'd like to share?

Thanks.

--
Matt Gushee