Hello, First off, let me say that I'm an indirect user of SpamAssassin, and have great respect for the time and engergy that has been put into developing and deploying it.
At my day job, our sysadmins have been using SpamAssassin for over a year. I'm not sure they feed it ham/spam as needed to keep the accuracy up to snuff -- I don't know if it's configured to use block-lists. It blocks offensive spams, probably using some regex stuff. However, I still get 25+ spams/day. They initially asked us to send them spams that get through, which I was happy to do. But I frankly have better things to do now with my time, especially given the amount of spam I get. I've already used SpamPal for years on my home ISP's email, which does no filtering of spam (I disabled it, as they would not give me details about how they filter spam!). SpamPal works wonderfully in this regard; few spams get through. Frustrated with how things are on my work email, I began to use SpamPal 1.591 on my Windows client connected to this same mail host with IMAP. With no configuration needed, SpamPal detects all of the spam that was getting through. I only enabled one additional plug-in (URL body), which checks IPs of URLs in the body for black lists. No content filtering takes place otherwise. By the way, there are some quirks with SpamPal, IMAP and Thunderbird 1.0, but that's another story... All of this makes me think about SpamAssassin's technique with Bayesian filters on content, and the Law of Diminishing Returns (http://www.bartleby.com/65/di/diminish.html). Is the extra time and energy required to keep the Bayesian filters working well worth the additional spam that it filters? SpamPal only uses some basic technique with black lists of IPs in the SMTP headers (I think). Unless you enable reg-ex or URL filtering in the body, it doesn't do anything like that. In my case, both on my home and work accounts, the vast majority of spams are filtered. I don't have numbers, but I'd be willing to guess it's over 90%. My question is this: can anyone recommend a lightweight, no-feeding-required setup for SpamAssassin 3.x similar to how SpamPal works? It would be ideal for getting the best return on investment from SpamAssassin, I think. I think our sysadmins (and I'm sure they're not unique) don't have enough time to feed ham/spam to the B. filters. Given the effectiveness of SpamPal's simple approach, it seems to me that the return on investment for correct Bayesion filtering is not worth it in our case. I'm not criticizing the approach, per se. Just saying it would be good to know how to set up a lightweight, low-maintenance version of SpamAssassin. I assume the underlying technologies of SpamAssassin and SpamPal are roughly equivalent in this regard, and it's just a question of configuring SpamAssassin to work with the black lists the way SpamPal does. Apologies if I'm off base in my assumptions, or I've misunderstood how SpamAssassin works. Cheers!
