'Low' and 'high' spam score thresholds?

[Jason Burzenski]

4.5 = deliver, forward (for review), tag
7 = store, forward (for review), tag

I've had to do a lot of blacklisting for 'gray' spam (my blacklist rules
file is about 12K now).  Once you dip the low scoring below 5, I think you
catch a lot of newsletters.  I've had my fair share of whitelist addresses
but not nearly as much as the blacklist (a mere 2K whitelist rules file ).

One reason Ive had a lot of whitelist/blacklisting to do is because we have
an inernally published administrator account for spam issues.  There are
some users who are very intersted in stamping out as much spam as possible
and are very active in participating.

Just some rough statistics:  on one of my MS servers that's processed about
50K messages since Monday identified about 20K messages as spam.  Almost 5K
of these messages were picked up in the blacklists (typically scoring
between 3.5 and 4) and would have otherwise been delivered to my users.



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter Bates [mailto:Peter.Bates at LSHTM.AC.UK]
> Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2003 7:52 AM
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: 'Low' and 'high' spam score thresholds?
>
>
> Hello all...
>
> Just a quick straw poll.
>
> We get on average 15-16K messages a day, of which, in
> general, 40% is now categorised by various means as 'rubbish'
> (senders on RBLs, SpamAssassin tests, etc.) ...
>
> At the moment I have the 'low' spam score at 8, and 'high' at
> 20, making the distinction between '{SPAM?}' and '{SPAM}' in
> Subject: header rewriting.
>
> I'm considering dropping the 'low' score due to the
> increasing number of things hovering around a score of 6 or
> so, and now '20' (at which I also do 'striphtml' as a
> mandatory action) seems a little high...
>
> What in general are other people using?
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ------------------------------------->
> Peter Bates, Systems Support Officer, Network Support Team.
> London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
> Telephone:0207-958 8353 / Fax: 0207- 636 9838
>