[wplug] Is Spamassassin good?

[Mike Sussman]

I have heard and read many good things about Spamassassin.  The other day, I 
installed it in my Kubuntu Feisty installation, using Kmail mail client.  
Spamassassin is implemented as a series of filters, and is not all that 
convenient because kmail locks up when it is checking mail in my imap 
account, and it can lock up  for several minutes.  But getting rid of spam is 
a good thing, and I am willing to put up with inconvenience it it works.

But my surprise is that it does not find very much spam!  It identifies only  
about 10% of the messages I would regard as spam myself.  I thought that by 
specifying messages as spam (one filter provided by the installation is 
named "Classify as spam"), that Spamassassin would learn and start picking 
more out, but it hasn't been happening that way.  When I look at some 
messages that are not identified as spam, I can see very low numbers (less 
than 2, when the default criterion is 5), so I think it will never be finding 
much spam.  And there was one distressing false positive from a friend of 
mine that I had to fix with by manually placing his address into the 
whitelist.

My question is: am I expecting too much for my type of installation?  Can I 
expect Spamassassin to find more than, say, 75% of the spam that is sent to 
me?  If so, how can I learn how to make that happen?

-- 
                       Mike Sussman
                       sussmanm at math.pitt.edu