The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023

Post by fer » Thu, Jan 04, 2024, 12:40 PM UTC

op00to wrote: post #23

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 switched from GMail to a personal Microsoft 365 domain when Google decided they didn't want to give me free email/domain services anymore. 365 was cheaper. I got about 10x the amount of spam to my 365 Junk folder than I did to the Junk folder in GMail. I would spend 10 minutes a day going through the junk folder to pick out false positives. I woud have inexplicable issues with missing email with 365, where the root…

Strange, while I keep my GMail address I don't use it for anything new anymore since roughly 50% of the positives are false (no false negatives, though).

Post by fer » Thu, Jan 04, 2024, 12:59 PM UTC

notatoad wrote: post #17

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?

> I get like 3-5 spams per week in my inbox I'm more curious about the opposite metric: how many non-spam emails a week arent getting delivered to you? Because that seems to be the real flaw in spamassassin: the false positive rate. And the spamassassin users don't usually have much visibility into this, so when emails don't get to them they just blame the sender.

Fastmail user here, so SpamAssassin I assume: virtually no false positives. My GMail spam folder is generally 50/50 false and true positives. I really can't use that email for anything as having to go to the spam folder every day defeats the purpose of an anti-spam filter.

Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023

Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023