[tech] SpamAssassin Changes

Andrew Adamson bob at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au
Sat Nov 24 21:21:16 WST 2012


Today I had the amazing idea of checking how many people are actually 
using UCC's spam filtering. Six. Yes, SIX people use it. Which is a shame, 
because it's actually pretty good. Only 23 people use UWA's spam filter! 
In short, I pity you all because you must have spam coming out your ears 
(unless you're one of those heathens who forwards your email to gmail, 
boooo).

There's two available levels of filtering - UWA level filtering, and UCC 
level filtering. The UWA filtering only blocks the most obvious of spam, 
so I don't think it's all that useful. UCC's spam filter is getting better 
by the day, and I haven't had any issues with false positives since it was 
reconfigured earlier this year.

To enable the weak UWA filtering, log into motsugo or mussel and run 
`touch ~/.filter-my-spam`

To enable the awesome-sauce UCC filtering, log into motsugo or mussel and 
run `touch ~/.filter-my-spam-more`

If you want, you can also help with training the spam filter. If something 
makes it through and isn't recognised as spam, bounce it to 
spameater at ucc.asn.au, and the filter will learn from it for next time. 
Please note you should only bounce actual spam from senders you have never 
given permission to email you - other people might still want to get 
emails from that mailing list you don't want to be a member of anymore!

Andrew Adamson
bob at ucc.asn.au

|"If you can't beat them, join them, and then beat them."                |
| ---Peter's Laws                                                        |

On Thu, 22 Nov 2012, Andrew Adamson wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> As part of my mission to reduce the amount of spam that lands in my inbox, 
> I've made a fairly large change to our spamassassin setup on mooneye. The 
> change is to turn on network checks, so public DNS blacklists are checked 
> for known spammers [1], and there is also some fuzzy hash checking of our 
> incoming mail against known spam emails [2] using pyzor [3] and razor2 
> [4].
> 
> The changes were too numerous to list, but it's worth noting for future 
> reference that I came up against python deprecation warnings thanks to 
> pyzor being written for python 2.4. The warnings cause spamassassin to 
> fail parsing the response. The fix is to simply ignore deprecation 
> warnings in the script for now [5].
> 
> CAN YOU PLEASE KEEP AN EYE OUT FOR FALSE POSITIVES. I don't want to have 
> legitimate emails going into spam folders!
> 
> Andrew Adamson
> bob at ucc.asn.au
> 
> |"If you can't beat them, join them, and then beat them."                |
> | ---Peter's Laws                                                        |
> 
> [1] http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/DnsBlocklists
> [2] http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/HashSharingSystem
> [3] http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/UsingPyzor
> [4] http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/UsingRazor
> [5] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pyzor/+bug/394775
> 


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