[H-GEN] Experiences with SpamAssassin

[Jason Parker-Burlingham]

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Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> writes:

> The installation sucks big time.  There's no "standard" way of doing
> it and the default puts files in /usr/bin and /etc/mail which should
> never happen.

I simply installed the Debian package, which more or less guarantees
things get installed in the right place; what did you do to install
it?

> To get an idea of performance (both speed and accuracy), I fed
> spamc an archive of known email.  It took 14 hours to process
> the test archive on a lightly-loaded Celeron-366 with 384 Mbytes
> of RAM -- that's about 0.6 seconds/message.
> 
> Here are the details:
> 
>     Total archive size	84516

Is that 84 megabytes of spam?

> Some of the spam it failed to identify won't normally be fed to
> it, but it's still going to miss about ten per cent of what I
> get.

I think that's about how much it misses in my email, too.

> And, although the false positive rate of 0.28% is pretty good, it's
> not good enough for me to just drop the identified spam in /dev/null

No, it isn't.

If you're using the (auto-) whitelisting, you may want to rerun the
tests to see if the false positive rate goes down.

> [1] My incoming spam figures for the past few years are:
>         1998   358
> 	1999   506
> 	2000   448
> 	2001  1102
> 	2002  5586  (up to 22/11)

Good lord.
-- 
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| ``I think I'm going to throw up.''                                    |
|                                             -- Kermit the Frog, Yambo |
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