Martijn Grooten wrote:
- I'm happy to add any extensions as long as these are also free and open source -- note that our 'target audience' includes big ISPs and unfortunately for them things as Spamhaus's RBL aren't free;
I'm not in any way trying to jump on what you're trying to do as I firmly believe SpamAssassin can be every bit as effective, if not more so, than any commercial product in fighting spam.
However, I would just like to raise one point - perhaps others can comment as to the technical correctness, but I was under the impression that the Spamhaus (and other) DNSBLs are enabled as part of the default SpamAssassin install (and weighted scoring system), so if you disable these tests because they are not free to larger volume users then you are not really testing the default product, but one in which you have disabled some of the more effective constituent parts. This IMHO would put SpamAssassin at a considerable disadvantage.
To give an analogy you might be more familiar with, it's a bit like you testing an antivirus product but saying we're not going to use any signatures as these aren't free (they require a paid subscription), so will only use heuristics and then wondering why said AV product only catches 50% of your sample viruses :-/
Personally, I'd rather see you test SpamAssassin with DNSBLs such as Spamhaus enabled as per a default installation, and note that such a configuration is only free for users producing less than 100,000 queries per day (or whatever Spamhaus' current limitations are). I assume the other commercial products in your tests are tested in their default configurations?
