Matt Kettler wrote:
Bill McCormick wrote:
OK, so they're parts of normal conversations. And geocites is a real
domain too, which scores fairly high since it's so prevalent in real
world spam. If this mail would have scored just 1 more point, we would
not even be having this conversation because SA would have deleted it.
Having a individual rules for this sort of thing that, when taken
together with other scores seems to be exactly what SA is all about.
Fair enough. Personally I don't have the end goal of trying to get all
my spam high scoring enough it gets deleted. I'm quite happy to
autodelete about half of it, and have the other half tagged and shuffled
into a junk box for my casual skimming. From this perspective, my
primary reaction was "hell, the score of the thing's over 13 points,
what more do you need?"
I worked the same way for some time. Then I found SARE. Now it's like an
obsession; must delete spam; must delete ALL spam :)
Maybe some of my custom scores could be further raised and/or my
sa_delete setting lowered, but they seem pretty reasonable and in line
with what others are doing.
How many rules do I need? As many as it takes. What's the rule count
up to anyway?
Anyway, I think I'll try my hand at writing some rules for this.
Just be aware that in general adding on more and more rules shifts up
the average score of both spam and nonspam. Ideally, your spam rules
should be as spam specific as possible, so this effect is more
noticeable in the spam, and less noticeable in the nonspam. At the most
extreme end, adding a lot of rules with very poor selectivity is on
average the same as reducing your thresholds.
Writing rules is easy, writing good rules is sometimes less obvious than
your think.
How true. I'm familiar with this axiom in my own line of work.
I strongly suggest a quick read of the version of the rules writing
guide over in the wiki, precluded by the admission that I am biased here
as I wrote the original text, but many have helped me along the way and
others have built much upon it since.
http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/WritingRules
Even if you know the mechanics of regexes and SA syntax, the "writing
better rules" at the end is quite handy.
Thanks!!
