Ensuring Custom Rules Are Scored Properly

[Andrew Wilkinson]

I'm experimenting with Fedora 8 and a miltered sendmail configuration 
running as a mail gateway (smf-sav, smf-spf, milter-greylist, 
clamav-milter, spamass-milter).  I've configured spamassassin's local.cf 
with a custom rule.  It's a simple regex which checks the 'Received' 
header on inbound mail for any  IP in a specific Class C range, and 
negatively scores the message with -100 (probably extreme).  I'm just 
trying to ensure these messages are never tagged as spam.  I've 
--lint-ed the rule and I receive no syntax errors.  However, messages 
coming in from an IP in the specified range don't appear to be 
negatively scored.  In fact, the test messages being sent were scored 
as, say, 2.8 before AND after the rule was put into place.  Spamass and 
spamassassin (as I'm running spamassassin daemonized) were both 
restarted after rule creation.  I've verified the regex is correct, 
running it though a couple regex testers. 

So, I guess I'd be expecting the X-Spam header on these messages to 
indicate a score of -97.2.  Am I assuming incorrectly?

thanks