Derrick,
Spam Assassin has cost me a large number of headaches. We have tried to use it a number of times which only resulted in customers getting extremely irate about how we are altering their emails. It causes a busy server to drive cpu load up through the roof, resulting in poor performance and lost email when the server begins to reject mail due to system loads.
Most importantly, the idea is to STOP spam, not just put a tag on it telling my customers that the mail they are looking at is possibly spam. They do not want to see that. They do not want to have to download hundreds of emails over a modem line (yes, we still have many thousands of modem users) so their email client can delete it based on one rule alone. This is where the problem in fact lies. Not simply making an already obvious observation that an email is spam and tagging as such.
Tools like exiscan do exactly what a virus tool should do. It stops it. It doesn't put a tag on it telling a customer that "hey you got a virus". It stops it and the customer never sees it. It doesn't kill my mail server by spawning perl processes for each mail arriving. Tools for spam should do exactly that as well. Integrated into exim using local_scan, stop spam instead of simply tagging it.
I am sure that spam assassin is a great solution for a number of sites, but for a busy ISP, it is simply too resource hungry and results in far too many complaints from customers.
Jeff
-----Original Message-----
From: Derrick 'dman' Hudson [
mailto:dsh8290@rit.edu]
Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2002 10:07 AM
To: exim-users@???
Subject: [Exim] Re: SPAM filtering
--
On Thu, Jul 18, 2002 at 09:39:07AM -0400, Jeffrey Wheat wrote:
| With the lack of response on this I get the feeling that this topic is
| not one that anyone wishes to discuss.
I think you killed the discussion from the beginning by saying you don't want to use SA -- lots of people (myself included) use SA and really like it.
| Perhaps there are some other mailing lists that someone might suggest
| that is actively trying to stop spam?
How about spamassassin-talk@???? The SA developers do try to effectively identify spam without tagging non-spam. The wider variety of users that contribute, the better the rules and the corpus will be. You can also tailor the scores and rules to your liking.
-D
--
The lot is cast into the lap,
but its every decision is from the Lord.
Proverbs 16:33
http://dman.ddts.net/~dman/
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