On Mon, 03 Jan 2005 13:09:02 -0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: > On Mon, 3 Jan 2005 15:49:33 -0500, "Gustafson, Tim" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > said: > > Hello > > > > I know that it's generally frowned upon to actually "block" SPAMs (as > > opposed to marking them as SPAM and letting the user decide) but my > > company has some instances where we get things that are blatantly, > > absolutely, unequivocally SPAM (think scores in excess of 100 points > > without BAYES or any white/blacklisting) and I wonder if there is a way > > I can configure SpamAssassin to actually block (as in, return a 550 SMTP > > error code) SPAMs that exceed some ludicrous SPAM score?
By the way, we reject messages that score above 10 with a 550. We found that almost 95% of spam scores over 10, and almost zero ham scores above five. Messages scoring between 5 and 10 are accepted, tagged, and relayed to their recipient. We definitely don't frown on rejecting messages with high scores. I believe rejecting most spam with a 550 at the internet gateway has been responsible for the amount of spam addressed to our domain dropping by over 50% since we started rejecting in March 2004. We have not had a single complaint from our users, even about any false positives in the 5-10 range tagged by SA. I posted earlier today about a recent 25% drop over the past month. In January 2004 we averaged more than 200,000 messages a week, over 90% spam. Last week we got 80,000 messages. Some people suggested that it was due to the holidays, but it was a fairly steady decline starting in late November, so it may have been something else. I hope it doesn't ramp up again, but who knows, maybe it was the holidays after all. I'll post an update next week unless anyone objects. -- snowjack(a)fastmail.fm
