Question on using SpamAssassin at a college?

[Matt <mh...@gmail.com>]

Hi,
Does anyone have experience with using spamassassin and rule sets at a
college environment?   We'd like to block just mail that is one
hundred percent spam, and not risk blocking false positives.  Any
thoughts or ideas?

Re: Question on using SpamAssassin at a college?

["Michele Neylon : Blacknight Solutions" <mi...@blacknightsolutions.com>]

On Mon, 2004-10-25 at 14:35 -0400, Matt wrote:
> Hi,
> Does anyone have experience with using spamassassin and rule sets at a
> college environment?   We'd like to block just mail that is one
> hundred percent spam, and not risk blocking false positives.  Any
> thoughts or ideas?

I'd recommend you look into MailScanner (http://www.mailscanner.info) It
uses SA in combination with a number of other technologies and is used
by quite a few academic institutions
> 
-- 
Mr Michele Neylon
Blacknight Solutions
http://www.blacknight.ie
059 9137101


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Re: Question on using SpamAssassin at a college?

[Daniel Quinlan <qu...@pathname.com>]

Matt <mh...@gmail.com> writes:

> Does anyone have experience with using spamassassin and rule sets at a
> college environment?   We'd like to block just mail that is one
> hundred percent spam, and not risk blocking false positives.  Any
> thoughts or ideas?

You can approach 100% accuracy to block spam by picking a very high
threshold, like 10 or 12 points.  I think it's pretty safe to block at
those levels (best to 550 reject via some sort of milter).

For lower scores (between 5 and 10), just tag with a Subject header and
leave the filtering decision up to users.

Instead of doing:

  > 5 ... tag
  > 10 ... block

You can also do something like:

  > 5 ... tag
  > 8 ... tag and folder into a "spam" folder

Or some mix.  As far as rule sets goes, the URL module is the best rule
set you can use.  Start with that and other baseline rules and see where
that gets you.

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Quinlan                     ApacheCon! 13-17 November (3 SpamAssassin
http://www.pathname.com/~quinlan/  http://www.apachecon.com/  sessions & more)