A Few Post Install Questions

[Logan Shaw]

On Wed, 19 Jul 2006, Jeff A. Earickson wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Jul 2006, Phillip Udel wrote:

>> Would it be unwise to push up the Spam score on RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET  and
>> a few other list servers to something like 15 to force the mail into a high
>> score and force the delete?  I figure if they are in the lists then I don't
>> need them.

> IMHO, bad move.  I used to use spamcop for a DNS RBL and they seemed to have
> gotten overly aggresive in the past six months or so.  I was starting to get
> howls from my users.  I quit using them both as a sendmail RBL and within 
> MailScanner's RBL list.  I just let SpamAssassin boost the spam score.  I 
> wouldn't fiddle with the default SA score either.

For what it's worth, a fair amount of effort does go into
setting the scores for SpamAssassin rules:

 	http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/HowScoresAreAssigned

They don't just say "ah, 1.5 sounds too high for that score,
but 1.0 sounds too low, so set it to 1.25".  Instead, they run
a neural net against a corpus of known messages and generate
the scores based on that.

The scores they assign are probably near optimal for that
corpus, so as far as I'm concerned, the only reason to mess
with the scores is if your own messages differ significantly
from the corpus they use to generate the scores.

I don't doubt that it is possible to outsmart a computer
with a clever AI algorithm and zillions of messages to use in
evaluating its set of scores, but I also don't think it's very
easy, unless you have a fairly unique situation.

   - Logan