The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023

Post by CableNinja » Tue, Jan 02, 2024, 4:47 PM UTC

BSDobelix wrote: post #16

srmarm wrote: post #9

I've been using SpamAssassin for at least 15 years and it's sadly gotten less useful as the spam arms race has moved on. We regularly see people on here post about deliverability issues with Gmail/Outlook but the truth is that sender reputation is by far the biggest indicator of whether a message will be spam - these type of rules are just counting deckchairs on the titanic in comparison. And this plays into the stre…

I like rspamd much more (performance and redis) than SpamAssassin, and as you mentioned: - https://www.mail-tester.com - https://www.learndmarc.com - https://mecsa.jrc.ec.europa.eu/en/ Are exellent tool's to check your "deliverability".

Post by El_RIDO » Tue, Jan 02, 2024, 4:57 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #3

lloydatkinson wrote: post #2

Some of those highlighted rules, such as using CC or having the string “can help” being used to decide if something is spam or not is so absurd I’ll make sure to never use SpamAssasin.

It is not and has never been a good classifier. If open AI fans want to contribute something of value to society, they would train a spam classifier on a large, manually-labeled corpus of mail, where the features include envelope data. That would get open source maybe 10% of the way to Gmail quality, or 100x better than SA.

Post by potatoman22 » Tue, Jan 02, 2024, 4:59 PM UTC

thesuitonym wrote: post #24

jeffbee wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not and has never been a good classifier. If open AI fans want to contribute something of value to society, they would train a spam classifier on a large, manually-labeled corpus of mail, where the features include envelope data. That would get open source maybe 10% of the way to Gmail quality, or 100x better than SA.

I hope against hope that AI spam detection never becomes a thing. At least with today's methods, I can tell a person why their message was marked as spam. If AI detection becomes the norm, all I can do is shrug and say, "Sorry, it's the algorithm."

Post by kjs3 » Tue, Jan 02, 2024, 5:03 PM UTC

brokensegue wrote: post #8

acidburnNSA wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I've been using SpamAssassin for over a decade personally (partly to avoid Google dependence), and it's been pretty darn good once I ran the Bayesian learning thing a few times many years ago. I get like 3-5 spams per week in my inbox. Do others really consider SA that bad?

On Gmail I get maybe 1 spam a month max in my inbox (and it blocks many per day)

Post by nradov » Tue, Jan 02, 2024, 5:06 PM UTC

rlpb wrote: post #20

srmarm wrote: post #9

I've been using SpamAssassin for at least 15 years and it's sadly gotten less useful as the spam arms race has moved on. We regularly see people on here post about deliverability issues with Gmail/Outlook but the truth is that sender reputation is by far the biggest indicator of whether a message will be spam - these type of rules are just counting deckchairs on the titanic in comparison. And this plays into the stre…

> It's a bonus to them that every time they block a smaller host there is a good chance that sender will consider a move to office365 or Google Workspace for their mail. The irony is that a substantial amount of the spam I receive comes from those platforms.