Make sure im doing this right

[David Lee]

On Wed, 17 Mar 2004, Matt Kaminer wrote:

> Our Mailscanner / SpamAssassin / Bayes / Big Evil List / ChickenPox /
> SpamCop.Net setup has been doing so well I have never gotten a false
> positve (although I get false negatives every so often).
>
> We have the Spam score set to 6 and high scoring spam set to 10.  We
> deliver spam and delete high scoring spam.
>
> Ive been thinking about lowering the high scoring spam to 8 and lowering
> spam to 5.  Lowering the spam level to 5 would basically wipe out all my
> false negatives.
>
> My question is this:  What is the "normal" settings.  Is 5 and 8 for high
> scoring spam too low?

I suspect different institutions would come up with different (and, for
them, appropriate) values.

We (a university) have spam level 6 (we don't have a separate "high"
level) and I'm not aware of any false positives.  I often think about
going down to 5, but that might introduce occasional false positives,
which, for us, would be highly undesirable.

We (the institution's I.T. Service) also deliver everything towards the
user.  Politically, this shows them (particularly the managerial types!)
that spam continues to be a real problem, and that their I.T. Service is
actively engaged in addressing it.  (We also advise the user on
client-side-filtering based on this score, making it clear to them that
this is their choice, and their false-positive risk.)

On the other hand, someone providing a service to, say, children in a
school might, for instance, take a much stricter approach, and be prepared
to sacrifice several false positives, (e.g. lower score with direct
automatic deletion) because of the overriding importance of child
protection.

So the "normal" of your request would probably be variable, and rightly
so, for differing institution-types, policy-types, etc.  For us it is
"avoid false positivies; spam 6; deliver everything; advise user on
client-side-filtering".

Hope that helps.


--

:  David Lee                                I.T. Service          :
:  Systems Programmer                       Computer Centre       :
:                                           University of Durham  :
:  http://www.dur.ac.uk/t.d.lee/            South Road            :
:                                           Durham                :
:  Phone: +44 191 334 2752                  U.K.                  :