[conspire] anti spam

[Adam Cozzette]

On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 10:36:47PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Adam Cozzette (acozzette at cs.hmc.edu):
> 
> > It takes some work to configure, though.
> 
> Among other things, you should consider adjusting the threshold levels
> to change them from the defaults.
> 
> Not _all_ spammers are morons, so a significant number of them test spam
> messages against default SA installations, to make sure their spamicity
> measures under 5.0, before sending them out.  So, it is greatly in your
> interest to modify your SA installation to make sure its heuristics
> differ from the defaults.  You might want to add some custom rulesets,
> or change the weightings, or lower the maximum spamicity permitted.
> And, of course, training the Bayesian classifier definitely helps.  (You
> might consider upping the weight given to the Bayesian test.)

I have to admit that I haven't actually tweaked SpamAssassin that much, because
most of the time it works well enough. I did lower the maximum allowed spam
score down from 5.0 to 3.0 some time ago after starting to receive a lot of
false negatives. Of course, that results in a false positive once in a while,
but not too often.

I might try your suggestion of upping the weight of the Bayesian test, and then
see if that will allow me to increase the allowed spam score (and thus get fewer
false negatives) without getting too many false positives. Thanks for your
suggestions.

-- 
Adam Cozzette
Harvey Mudd College Class of 2012