The best of both worlds - a hybrid approach? [LWN.net]

The best of both worlds - a hybrid approach?

Posted Feb 23, 2006 2:23 UTC (Thu) by wstearns (subscriber, #4102)
In reply to: The best of both worlds - a hybrid approach? by corbet
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to bayesian spam filters

There's the catch - Spamassassin is all or nothing. I've watched the mailing list for many years now, and every once in a while someone will suggest bypassing expensive checks if the score is high enough with the quick and easy ones. The answer always comes back no, when you use SA all the checks are used, even if the sender is in a whitelisted domain (that just subtracts 100 from the still-expensively-calculated score). The logic is that the expensive tests might reduce a high score, so we need to do all the checks.

Don't get me wrong - I still love, and use, and actively support SA, but the all-or-nothing approach means it needs beefy CPUs, lots of ram, and a relatively large amount of time to use all tests.

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Making SA even better

Posted Feb 23, 2006 8:47 UTC (Thu) by zmi (subscriber, #4829) [Link]

One thing to mention when using SA is that there is
http://rulesemporium.com/ with lots of additional rules to filter certain
types of SPAM. With those, classification can be made almost perfect.

And with the additional RulesDuJour script found on
http://www.exit0.us/index.php?pagename=RulesDuJour you can even update
those rules automatically each night, adopting to new spam almost
immediately.

have fun without spam,
zmi