[wplug] SpamAssassin

[Bill Moran]

Teodorski, Chris wrote:
> Has anyone seen any statistics on the success rate of SpamAssassin?  Or any
> good articles?
> 
> I'm trying desperately to prevent my boss from sticking in another MS
> exchange box to act an SMTP relay (I'd like to use postfix) but I'm having
> trouble finding any real numbers.

I don't use SpamAssassin (because I don't approve of content filters, but that's
another issue altogether)

However, if you want some stats:
http://www.potentialtech.com/cgi-bin/awstats.pl?config=mail

Down at the bottom, you can see some results of blocking methodology.
You can see that I'm blocking about 600 emails a day from mail servers with
misconfigured DNS.  Another 200 or so get blocked as a result of my black
list config.

This dropped the amount of spam I get personally from about 200/day (before I
started blocking) to about 5 a day.  It's very low overhead (spamassassin will
eat up TONS of cpu, if you've got a lot of messages going through) and very
low bandwidth compared to spamassasin, which has to accept the message, then
decide to discard it (this way, it gets rejected before it's ever sent)

I have 5 or 6 entries in my whitelist (mailservers that are misconfigured, but
I allow them to send me mail anyway, because they're customers)  So the
incidence of false positives is pretty low.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com