Is SpamAssassin still in Perl?? I thought that had been rewritten as python
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I think you should have a negative score attached to the whilelist. Also, you need to up the (positive) scores of Spam-identifying rules markedly. The way it's set up, most spam will get through. A rule like "Composed in m$ Front Page" had a score of 1.5, with a fail mark of 5. Who writes mail in M$ Front Page? I don't even know if Front Page exists still - a HTML creator thing. It was a 100% indicator of spam. I gave it a score of +5.2.
IIRC, the plugins were rulesets? I must confess to using spamc/spamd because they were binary and I didn't have the ram for several simultaneous instances of some perl behemoth. Procmail ran me out of ram also.
I had to be a member of an Electronic Hardware mailing list back 20 years ago. I found the spam that list attracted was particularly offensive. Spammers had to join to post, but they targeted hundreds with just the one email(before they were banned). To catch spam my mail went through
- Vipul's Razor, which Caught ~50% of spam.
- Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse (DCC) which caught the rest of the bulk mail.
- SpamAssassin which got 30% on average.
My efficiency eventually was nudged up to 105%. So I had to trawl spam for real mail occasionally. One of my brothers always landed himself in the spam, for instance. But I didn't whitelist him - he belonged in the Spam
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You will find a mailing list/forum or irc channel attached to the SpamAssassin site which is/was well supported by these guys who could instantly express any unclean thoughts you may be privvy to in Perl Regular Expressions. They are always welcoming of anyone they could talk at(!), and competed for the most exotic or innovative answers to your questions. They might prove to be of assistance.
I found it useful to keep a (mbox style ascii) mailbox full of spam. I could test my settings by simply
Code:
cat mbox >127.0.0.1:25
which bounced them at postfix & delivered them to me. It allowed me to refine the settings.