Topic: reliability of spamassassin

[Matthias Redl]

Hi!

For a couple of days I have spamassassin running to filter spam mails. I use the server panel from "e-smith-spamassassin-0.0.2-1.noarch.rpm" to configure spamassassin and although I already use the highest sensitivity not many mails are marked as spam.

Before that I had a spamassassin proxy running on my windows client that caught almost all spam mails.

Any ideas why the same software works totally different in the two versions?

Matthias

[Michiel]

Does SA actually scan your messages? Look in the header of a message for the "X-Spam-Status" string. It should say something like No, hits=0.4 required=2.0. If it's not there, SA is not scanning your messages.

[Matthias Redl]

Thanks Michiel!

Are you sure, that mails which are not regarded as spam will contain this header too?

I know that some mails are filtered, and those mails do contain the header you specified (of course the hits value is then higher than the required value).

Therefore I guess that Spam Assassin is checking my mails, but the other mails which are not regarded as spam do not contain the header.

Is this correct or not?
Matthias

[Andy Berry]

I am also running SpamAssassin.
Yes, every email has those X-Spam headers, even the ones that are allowed through the filter.

-A

[Matthias Redl]

Can anybody imagine how it is possible that some of my mails have the header and some others don't if they all come through the same account on my SME?

Matthias

[Doug M.]

I don't believe messages coming from the internal network are checked by spammassassin. Other than that I dunno. I use spamassassin and only have 4 - 5 spam message get past spam assassin per month.

[Matthias Redl]

strange...actually almost all mails I get (and especially all spam mails) come via the external network/interface. If what you say is true, they should be checked. But only some are.

I tried to find a log which logs what mails are checked and which are not, didn't find one yet.

Matthias

[Ray Mitchell]

Matthias
I wonder if you have spamassassin setup correctly. For the filtering to work you should be using procmail, either configured manually or you need to instal the user manager rpm (e-smith-userpanel-1.0-11.noarch.rpm), and setup procmail rules for each user account.
Have you installed the user manager (sometimes called user panel rpm(s)) ??

If you only instal the Spamassassin rpm(s), spamassassin will do nothing.

Regs
Ray

[Matthias Redl]

embarassing, but I think you are right. I looked at the headers of my old mails (they had the X-Spam Header because Spam Assasin was running on my local computer.).

OK, now I have to deal with procmail. Let's see....


Matthias

[Tim]

get the procmail contrib from contribs.org

I would also install the newest version of spamassassin from rpms,

spammers test thier mailing thru spamassassin also and the older version graded well when they were new but don't do as well as the newest version does.