Spamassassin Effectiviness

I've been noticing something similar - lots more spam has been getting through the filters than normal. I have additional exim acl's and rulesets installed, however. I haven't been able to track down the cause.

 

I third this motion! I'm using Chirpy's MailScanner setup and have had very few problems over the last four to six months. This month suddenly I'm getting complaints and noticing my own mailbox housing spam that somehow popped through.

 

ok I fourth the motion! Ive also been using Chirpy's mailscanner install (which totally rocks by the way especially for its perfect implementation of MailWatch) and my spam filtering has been nearly flawless with daily bayes training against any false negatives. In the past four days though I have been getting hammered with new spam that is not getting scored highly by mailscanner.

Spam is the scourge of the earth. Do people actually make money with these ridiculous emails? I can't believe it.


An aside, how do spambots get info about user accounts on the server? I often see spam that comes to many users on different domains at the same time. How can this be prevented?

 

Spamassassin

Spamassassin is now a month old so the increase is probably a new method by spammers to bypass it.

 

Agreed, however in scanning through the new spam getting through it seems absolutely ridiculous to me they bother to send these things out at all. One word subjects with a body that is only a sentence long that is so misspelled and badly formatted that I don't even have a clue WHAT they're trying to hawk to me.

I also use Chirpy's Mailscanner setup and I am totally happy with how it performs, btw! But I think what the OP is saying is that it seems SA defaults scores might have changed or lowered for some reason, resulting in lower scoring spam across the board perhaps...

 

Definitely! Make no mistake about it -- SPAM is a very good business and spammers make BIG $$$$$. As you may know, SPAM is a form of advertising, no different from telemarketers or junk mailers - and it's a very cost effective form of advertising, too. Sending 10,000 email messages to people costs a fraction of what it would cost to call or mail 1,000 people. Such low overhead allows a much wider audience to be reached, and only a tiny percentage needs to respond to make a profit.

This Web site has an excellent information on Spambots: http://www.turnstep.com/Spambot/