[wplug] Is Spamassassin good?

[kabel]

On Saturday 18 August 2007 13:32:49 Mike Sussman wrote:
> 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?

I have had the same problems with SpamAssassin on FreeBSD 6.2.. it's pretty 
start and stop.  I know that it's used a lot in mail server contexts, which 
might be part of it.  I also know that if you feed it a LOT of mail at once, 
it'll hose KMail, but I've had that problem with filters that just sort, too.

>From what I understand, however, it does take some "training" to build up some 
sort of data set by which to judge mail, based on what you classify as spam.  

If I'm in error, I'm quite confident that someone will correct me.

kabel