evolution spam filtering.

[Scot L. Harris]

On Sun, 2004-10-03 at 12:18, Pasha wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> What are the possibilities to setup spam filtering in evolution? It 
> looks that it is possible to pipe messages through spamassassin. Is 
> there any better way?
> 
> Thanks,
>  Pavel.

I have been using spamassassin as a filter in evolution for some time
now.  It works very well.  You will need to spend some time training the
bayes database and possibly add some additional rule sets from the SARE
web site.  

Currently spamassassin is trapping 150 to 200 spam messages a week.  I
only get 3 or 4 spam a week in my in box.  And I have not had any false
positives for well over a year.

I setup some scripts which I run manually once every couple of weeks to
process the spam I have received (including the spam that was tagged and
specifically the untagged spam that go through).  This is done by having
two folders, one where all tagged spam is moved and another folder where
I manually move any spam that got through.  The scripts process these
messages for the bayes database so it is continually improved.

One suggestion when using spamassassin in this mode is to setup some
additional filters which handle mailing list traffic.  In my case I move
mailing list traffic to separate folders.  Put these filters first in
the list with a rule that says stop processing when those filters are
hit.  This way spamassassin only runs on non-mailing list messages.  I
have found very little spam going to the mailing lists and this will
save a lot of processing time on your system. 

Now if you are running a full blown MTA and have control of that part of
the server I would recommend you implement greylisting along with
spamassassin system wide.  Greylisting will block 98% to 99% of spam
from ever getting on your server.  Spamassassin will catch virtually all
the rest.

-- 
Scot L. Harris
webid at cfl.rr.com

"It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us in trouble.  It's the
things we know that ain't so."
-- Artemus Ward aka Charles Farrar Brown