[NCLUG] SpamAssassin Testimonials?

[Michael Milligan]

Bill Thorson wrote:
> 
> The very first day I ran it a message from my on-line broker about a 
> stop-sell
> being activated and executed was filtered out as spam.   It's not as 
> rare as
> you might guess.

Ouch.  Yes, I remember it being a bit of a pain the first month, putting 
in whitelist additions and making some minor scoring adjustments (e.g., 
setting MICROSOFT_EXECUTABLE to 10.00 along with setting report_safe to 
2 to "de-claw" messages to be type text/plain), but it's still very rare 
for me anymore.  The most recent default whitelist is pretty good, much 
better than when I got started.  But for just such occasions, I still 
file them in an out of the way place, not just discard or bounce them. 
I actually find it quite interesting to see what the spammers are doing 
with headers and body obfuscation.  It's amazing how full of bogus tags 
some HTML spam is these days to try to get past string-matching body checks.

jbass at dmsd.com wrote:
> 
> Probably the most common case I've seen in the last year are Ebay seller
> responses which include html mail. This single class can be frustrating.
> 

Interesting, I haven't had that problem.  But then again all the ones 
I've had come in from Paypal, so far, and paypal.com is in the default 
whitelist.

Regards,
Mike

PS:  Not to get too far off topic, but I've noticed a couple of social 
engineering attacks against Paypal and Ebay recently, claiming they have 
incorrect billing information and try to send you to their evil place 
like http://paypal.someotherdomain.com or http://www.ebayupdate.info. 
Watch out!

-- 
Michael Milligan  --  Free Agent  --  milli at acmeps.com