Upgrade to SpamAssassin 3.1.5 a big success
It was around a year ago that I put SpamAssassin into my site-wide email setup, and at the time had been pretty happy with the results. The combination of SpamAssassin at the server, and Thunderbird’s spam detection at the client was pretty effective. But over the last 6-8 months especially, the spam situation had been getting a lot worse - around 100 spam messages were making it past the mail server each day. Thunderbird did its best, but there were still 20 or so spam messages that ended up appearing in my Inbox.
So, taking advantage of a long weekend here, I decided to upgrade SpamAssassin.
Wow.
This morning, I opened my Inbox to find 0 spam messages. And a quick look at my “Spam” folder showed that 65 spam messages had been caught - the majority of which had been caught at the server. The new setup has only been running for 10 hours, but that certainly looks promising!
Upgrading to the latest engine no doubt helped, but there have been two specific “extras” that I think are making a big difference.
- I’ve added the Net::DNS perl module to my system - I gather SpamAssassin uses this for RBL lookups and the like. When I first installed SpamAssassin, I didn’t bother with this - it lists a pile of optional modules you’re missing, but is happy to build without them. Net::DNS is one of these “optional modules”. I’d recommend you consider it mandatory!
- I’ve enabled Bayesian filtering. This is the feature that allows SpamAssassin to “learn” which messages are spam. It is a bit of a fiddle - permissions in particular are the big gotcha - but I’m hoping that this will also help keep my spam defences “ahead of the curve”.