I'm operating a small companies mailserver (running Spamassassin 3.0.2 invoked by the qpsmtpd spamassassin plugin on Debian Linux), and lately i'm observing a major increase in spam that comes through the filter.
When looking into this problem, i noticed that the scoring results seems to be much lower than what i was used to. I have set up my system to reject any spam with score over 8 and handle score over 5 as probable spam. But when i checked my messages i found that nearly all ham now has scores below zero, while spam already starts at 1.5 to 2.0. I wonder what the reasons for this are, and if i should lower my threshold to a value of 3 or something liek this, but i fear false positives because i do not understand the reason for this scoring. Here are some examples of spam which came through and has only low score while having triggered much rules: | X-Spam-Status: No, hits=5.0 required=8.0 | tests=BAYES_99,DRUGS_ERECTILE,DRUG_DOSAGE,DRUG_ED_CAPS,HTML_40_50, | HTML_MESSAGE,HTML_TEXT_AFTER_BODY,HTML_TEXT_AFTER_HTML,MIME_HTML_ONLY, | RCVD_NUMERIC_HELO,SUBJECT_DRUG_GAP_VIA | X-Spam-Status: No, hits=1.4 required=8.0 | tests=BAYES_50,HTML_90_100,HTML_FONT_BIG,HTML_FONT_LOW_CONTRAST, | HTML_MESSAGE,HTML_MIME_NO_HTML_TAG,MIME_HEADER_CTYPE_ONLY,MIME_HTML_ONLY, | NORMAL_HTTP_TO_IP | X-Spam-Status: No, hits=1.6 required=8.0 | tests=BAYES_50,DATE_IN_PAST_12_24,INVALID_DATE,NO_REAL_NAME,SUBJ_ALL_CAPS | X-Spam-Status: No, hits=1.9 required=8.0 | tests=BAYES_50,HTML_50_60,HTML_MESSAGE,IP_LINK_PLUS,MIME_HEADER_CTYPE_ONLY, | MIME_HTML_ONLY,NORMAL_HTTP_TO_IP,RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET,URI_REDIRECTOR Now, is this scoring normal? I wonder if messages with 50 to 99% bayes should only get such low scores. Should i lower my threshold or should i higher the scores for the bayes rules? Or is something broken with my setup? Regards Michael -- It's an insane world, but i'm proud to be a part of it. -- Bill Hicks