Skilled spammers

[Matt Kettler]

Getting back to your original question about where to submit false
negatives to so future SA/MailScanner releases will catch them...

MailScanner doesn't really do any "active" development to catch the spam,
it's more of a tool that facilitates the use of several other anti-spam
tools, so of the two, SA is your best bet.

There at one point was a list intended for this kind of reporting but the
SA webpage fails to mention it now. Probably because most people submitting
to it were forwarding, not redistributing and they may have stopped using
it.  The list was spamassassin-sightings. Ask on the spamassassin-talk list
what the currently desired false negative reporting mechanisms are, someone
should be able to point you in the right direction.  Also, before reporting
it as a miss for SA, be sure you are running the current version (2.41 at
the moment). SA score patterns age as trends in spam and nonspam change, so
a false neg for an older version of SA may not be one for newer versions.

Of course, if you want to go to extremes, you can start building your own
test set, writing rules, and submitting them to the SA bugzilla.

The other way is to report the emails to Razor, and other similar spam-hash
systems, that way those spams will be caught by anyone using razor, and
anyone using razor with SpamAssassin. Admittedly razor is down a lot, but
it is a good system in general.


At 11:35 AM 9/7/2002 +0100, Bruno Melloni wrote:
>I use the default RBLs (free) that come with MailScanner and
>SpamAssassin.  I am an individual
>and cannot afford to pay for RBL access.  Anyway, I have managed to stop
>them through creative
>blacklisting, my question was about improving the two base tools - they
>are quite good as they are
>(stop 95% of my spam) and would be nice to make them even better so that
>people won't need to
>relay on yet more components.
>
>Bruno