[H-GEN] Experiences with SpamAssassin

[Greg Black]

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Jason Parker-Burlingham wrote:

| 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?

Got the source tarball and followed the instructions, which are
something like untar, perl Makefile.PL, make, sudo make install.

For stuff like this, even if there was a package for my chosen
architecture, I would not use it.  It's something that belongs
on my site local partition(s), and it's best (in my opinion) to
install from source.

Of course, that all works so much better when the usual
"./configure --my-weird-options && make && sudo make install"
mantra works.

| > 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?

No, it's 84 thousand messages (of which nearly 8,000 were spam).

| > 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.

There's no practical way to compare the figures, and I'm not at
all inclined to use the auto-whitelisting feature.  I will need
to put some addresses into my user whitelist, but I'll do that
manually as I see the need.  At least it looks as though I can
cut down on the interruptions to my day from incoming spam, and
that's something to be thankful for, even though I still believe
that the *right* answer is to make life so bad for spammers that
they give up and stop wasting everybody's bandwidth with their
rubbish, not to just deal with it after it has been delivered.

| > [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.

That's one way of putting it.  And note that those counts are
only the stuff that got delivered -- tons of it gets blocked
because of blacklists, etc., before the scum even get a chance
to talk to my smtp daemon.

Greg

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