The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
1–10 of 92 posts
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#2Some 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.
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#3Some 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.
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#4Some 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.
Does SpamBayes still work?
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#5Some 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.
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?
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#6Some 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.
We'll get there eventually, but it will be a bit. Spam classification at scale is already a compute-bound, or at least compute-starved, operation. Spam classification systems already do what they can to avoid so much as invoking a virus scanner if they can avoid it, because at scale it's so expensive. LLM-based spam classification is another order of magnitude more expensive and would require hardware that current spam systems do not have.
But that's a problem that will resolve itself over time, in a variety of ways. And the spam systems can play the same tricks with only invoking it on a fraction of emails too, of course. It's just at current expense levels, that would be a very small fraction indeed. I'd hazard that trying to use modern AI on spam classification at scale could easily consume 10x-100x of all current AI hardware and still make less of a dent than you'd hope.
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#7Having the rules public seems to take away most of the benefits...
Any smart spammer will just tweak his spam to not hit these rules... And if he hasn't, it's because the vast majority of people don't use SpamAssassin
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#8Earlier 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.
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)
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#9I'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 strengths of the big mail networks in detection. 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.
As an aside, not sure if OP is related to them but updown.io is a nice service and I appreciate the simple PAYG pricing! For what it's worth their mails seem to get through successfully to me too.
Also for those facing mail delivery issues (or just practicing good email hygiene) - I recommend www.mail-tester.com - they give you an email address to send a mail to and carry out a heap of tests - including checking against SpamAssassin + blacklists, SPF/DNS/etc testing.
Re: The funny rules of SpamAssassin in 2023
#10Having the rules public seems to take away most of the benefits... Any smart spammer will just tweak his spam to not hit these rules... And if he hasn't, it's because the vast majority of people don't use SpamAssassin
>smart spammer
I am sure there are plenty of smart spammers, but it also seems like a lot of spam comes from folks using scripts and email lists they use without fully understanding. It appears SpamAssassin would help with those operations.