Spam on the Rise. Any new tips?

[jdow]

From: "Thom Paine" <painethom at gmail.com>

> I've been noticing that the config I had been using for aboutthe past
> year is slowly becoming less effective against spam.
> 
> I'm currently using half a dozen or so bl's along with spam assassin.

SARE is a wonderful rule source. http://www.rulesemporium.com/ is your
friend. Go to the "rules" page. Read the description of the rule sets
carefully, and select those which meet your needs.

If you are REALLY desperate, have a poorly trained BAYES, and have
a lot of image spam you MIGHT check out the spamassassin-users list
archives for "FuzzyOCR". It is HIGHLY experimental and more than
moderately effective at this point.

http://www.rulesemporium.com/programs/sa-stats.txt is a good script
for assessing the effectiveness of your various rules. A well trained
BAYES will leave you with BAYES_99 catching about 60% or more of all
spam and 0.04% or so of ham. BAYES_00 will have that pretty much the
reverse. If you have that raise the BAYES_99 score until you see it
developing false hits or reach a score equal to your threshold. (I
use the default of 5 with a LOT of SARE rule sets. I have perhaps
a couple spams in a week get trough out of 25000 emails a month. I
get virtually no hams get mismarked.)

{^_^}