[clue-tech] Me vs. Spam and Spamassassin

[Jed S. Baer]

Hi Folks.

Well, I'm once again looking for advice on combatting spam. Been working
on it most of the day, and made some real headway. But ...

Some really ugly sample messages are coming out with really low scores.

So here's some info.

Spamassassin 3.1.7
CentOS 5
Postfix 2.3.3-2
procmail 3.22

I doubt the version of Postfix, procmail, or CentOS are relevant.

I'm invoking Spamassin via procmail, directed from a .forward file.
Seemed the easiest thing to do, rather than config postfix to run it. And
that all works fine. When I look at mail, I see the relevant Spamassassin
headers, so mail is getting piped through SA just fine, and afterwards
procmail is delivering it as specified. Hey, I even got IMAP running.
Whheeeeeeeeee! Also, I'm not using Bayesian filtering, as the various
docs indicate that our spam/ham ration is too large to have that be
useful.

I've read Schawtz's Spamassasin book, and poked around the official SA
wiki online. Based on what I've read, the claim is that even without
Bayesian filtering, SA should be detecting spam pretty well, using just
its various processing rules. Without going into gory detail, I've sent a
variety of crap through it, and the highest score I've seen is 1.4. Given
the default for "this looks like spam" is 5, I'm surprised.

Anyways, I've done almost zero mucking about with the SA local.cf file --
just enough to keep it simple. IOW, I haven't modified any scoring
factors.

So, what are other folks' experience with SA? Does it mostly just work
out of the box, or do you have to muck with it significantly?

jed