Configuring SpamAssassin

SpamSieve
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1

I have been using SpamSieve for several years, and it has been phenomenally accurate. Lately, however, more and more junk is getting through - about 20 offers a day from Dr Oz, coffee beans, and dozens of lottery prizes!

I have my own domain at HostGator and have access to the SpamAssasin config file. After reading through the FAQs, it seems like SpamAssassin can be configured to further improve SpamSieve’s filtering capabilities:

Many mail hosts offer SpamAssassin or a similar filter. Make sure the filter is set not to add Junk or another tag to the message’s subject. Also, try to configure the filter not to move the messages out of the inbox. It is actually good if you can leave the filter on, but set so that it only tags the message’s headers (e.g. by adding X-Spam-Status and X-Spam-Report headers). This will allow SpamSieve to incorporate the work that the server filter has done into its analysis.

Could someone please elaborate on how to achieve this? I read through the syntax at:
Mail::SpamAssassin::Conf - SpamAssassin configuration file, and got completely lost!

Any help will be appreciated.

2

There may be something wrong with the training or setup. I would encourage you to send in a report with your log file.

I don’t think you need to go into the config file. From this video it looks like HostGator has a GUI interface for enabling SpamAssassin and disabling auto-deletion.

3

Thanks for the quick reply.

Here is the log and Mac info:
Mountain Lion 10.8.3
SpamSieve 2.9.6
Apple Mail

I used the HostGator interface to enable SpamAssassin, and disable Spam Delete.

4

Thanks for sending the log file. It looks like you have not been consistent about correcting the mistakes that SpamSieve has made. Thus, it has learned some incorrect information about which messages are spam, and this is reducing the filtering accuracy. I recommend resetting the corpus and retraining SpamSieve.

5

Thanks again. I have reset the corpus and done some initial training. Let’s see how things progress.

Cheers,
Allan

6

It’s doing it again
Hi Michael,

Things were going well for a few months, then suddenly Apple Mail went nuts on me a few days ago. It would freeze for several minutes then come back. I dumped the container folder, let it create a new one, and then found that I had to set up all my accounts again. I didn’t want to do that, so I put the old container folder back. Since then SpamSieve hasn’t been cleaning the spam at all, so I reset the corpus once again, and trained it again. I hope that will do it, but I wanted to ask if you have seen this type of behavior before, and if so, what might have been the cause of it?

Addendum after latest reset and retrain: now it is not removing ANY spam messages at all. What should be done?

Cheers,
Allan

Here are the stats after the reset and retrain:

Filtered Mail
7,775 Good Messages
11,550 Spam Messages (60%)
84 Spam Messages Per Day

SpamSieve Accuracy
8 False Positives
371 False Negatives (98%)
98.0% Correct

Corpus
262 Good Messages
780 Spam Messages (75%)
129,343 Total Words

Rules
3,854 Blocklist Rules
19,098 Whitelist Rules

Showing Statistics Since
2/23/13 9:25 AM

7

No.

Sounds like a setup problem, not a training problem.