Category Archives: Email

Yet another release of SpamAssassin is out. Spam is definetly getting harder to track. I got one this afternoon that simply asked me to click on a url. How can you defend against that? Maybe the tmda folks have a point..

Note to self, install this at work on Monday: SpamAssassin 2.51 (via Dangerous Meta)
Over the last few days a lot more spam has got through to my inbox, and it seems to be after I installed version 2.50 of SA. This could be because I was still training the Bayesian filters. I also blacklisted *@artist-server.com as they were very persistent in spamming me. That helped, and putting the threshold down to 4.5 caught 2-3 spams. Today was better. Perhaps the Bayesian filters are working now!
On another related matter, I configured Goldmine to filter out spam, but it’s unusable. Goldmine has to create a new identity for each new email address so it’s easier to delete the email “online” before it’s downloaded. (If you knew Goldmine you’d know what I mean, it sucks!)

The latest release of SpamAssassin has support for Bayesian analysis. You have to train it and it gets better.
The only problem is SpamAssassin uses a command line app, sa-learn, to learn about your mail. Who’ll volunteer to create a web-based form to copy and paste spam/legitimate mail to train it? Adding an “upload file” button would be great too to for those mass-mail learning situations when you come into work in the morning..
It should be easy enough, although you’ll have to use su-exec or something to add rules to different user’s accounts. So, who’s up for it then?

I love Spam Assassin too, it’s a great tool and catches 99.999% of the spam I’m sent!