SpamAssassin Experiences

The servers we use now have it, but is it good?

[bumpaw]

Our hosting service is now offering SpamAssassin on it's servers and would like to know of anyone's first hand experience. The last thing I need is clients that are loosing email, but some are burdened by Spam and can't seem to control it on their end.

[bcolflesh]

They shouldn't lose anything - stuff judged to be spam will have it's header prefaced by: [spam]

[pleeker]

It's what we use, and I love it. Wonderful.

I'm no expert on this side of things ... but I believe the final effectiveness depends on how the software is implemented. The sysadmin has a lot of options on which filters to turn on or off, how to change scoring for each filter, etc. Our sysadmin tweaks it on a regular basis based on our own testing and user feedback.

[mivox]

My host lets each account set it's own thresholds for the filtering... I find filtering everything rated "***" or higher works best. The only email that ends up marked on accident are big commercial newsletter type things, and I rarely see one I want to read bad enough to bother with.

My employer's host has SA set to "****" or higher, we can't adjust our personal settings, and it hardly catches half the spam we get in.

[jatar_k]

we use it for 2 things

our mail servers run it and, I think, we use 5 as our base, works great, no complaints

we also have it setup on another box outside of our domain and use it to evaluate emails that we send to our members. We tweak content and headers to get our spam rating on requested emails below 0.1 so aol, hotmail and other webmail users won't have to go digging through bulk/junk mail folders to find requested emails.

[pleeker]

You're right mivox -- I forgot to mention, too, that each user also has control over how to handle emails depending on how they get scored by the software. But the sysadmin also has a lot of control over the initial scoring. :)

[bumpaw]

Thanks for all the great responses. Would this hosting condition be normal?

Unfortunately, the option to send the spam messages to a special folder is not yet implemented. However, we are considering it as an option in the future.

Right now there are two possible outcomes. They are to let the message pass or bounce it. I am able to set the filter level by email account which is good.

[pleeker]

That's one of the things the sysadmin has to decide on. We decided to give everyone a free "spambox" (a new mailbox) so they could route all email tagged as spam there ... and then check that box every now and then to make sure they aren't missing important stuff.