SpamAssassin default rules

[Quentin Campbell]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter Peters [mailto:P.G.M.Peters at civ.utwente.nl] 
> Sent: 31 July 2002 09:14
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: Re: SpamAssassin default rules
> 
> 
> On Tue, 30 Jul 2002 19:27:40 +0100, you wrote:
> 
> >I wouldn't dream of touching them personally, the SA 
> development guys 
> >put a lot of work into getting the scores right. The only 
> thing I would 
> >do is increase the "required_hits" value to 9 instead of 5. That 
> >produces pretty much 0 false positives.
> 
> The only thing I did was disable blocklisting. I use an 
> extended set of BL's from within MailScanner.
> 
> In regard to increasing the required hits: I kept it at 5 and 
> the only false positives I get are complaints about spam 
> which include the spam-body.
> 

Since the issue of local SpamAssassin rules has been raised I have some
comments.

I have built up an extensive range of local rules, some of which have
the effect of adding a negative score to counteract certain default
rules *if* special local conditions apply. Other local rules extend the
spam checking to areas that the default rules do not cover.

The local overide rules and scores are in
/etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf. As well as the rules described above
this file also includes local overides such as for "required_hits",
which was raised today from 6 to 9, and for disabling blacklisting by SA
as Peter Peters has done.

If you maintain local rules in the way recommended by the SpamAssassin
docs, and described above, BEWARE of the new "spam.assassin.prefs.conf"
file provided by MailScanner. This file will overide any other local
changes that you have made in the places recommended by the SpamAssassin
docs.

In our case the "spam.assassin.prefs.conf" file should be empty OR all
lines should be comments OR the "SpamAssassin Pref File =" entry in
mailscanner.conf should be null OR should point at (for this site)
"/etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf".

I would welcome Julian's comment/advice on this. I believe that the
entry in mailscanner.conf for the "SpamAssassin Pref File" should have a
"Health Warning" comment added and/or a bit more explanation about
why/when it is needed.

One final point. Although this will be obvious to most, I do my testing
of changes to local SpamAssassin rules as a non-root user and by using
"spamassassin -t" for applying the new rules aginst test messages. The
rules file for development are in the file
~myloginid/.spamassassin/user_prefs.

This way the rules I am developing are not seen by the production
MailScanner/SpamAssassin which runs as root. However note that when
doing the testing as the non-root user the local rules in
/etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf *are* visible to "spamassassin -t". Make
sure that this file is "read" to everyone for this to be the case. 

Quentin
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