Spamassassin upgrade makes for a huge improvement
I run Spamassassin on my server where I have my primary email account (yes, I still run my own email server, I know, that’s so 1995). Anyhow, I haven’t upgraded Spamassassin, or its rulesets, in about 3 years, and the volume of spam that’s been slipping through is really getting insane. Sure, the clients can weed out a bunch of it, but their rules aren’t as sophisticated as everything that SA can do. I finally took the plunge and upgraded it, which actually was pretty painless considering I am running an ancient version of RH (really ancient, don’t ask) and was moving from an old RPM to a new source-build. I still had to upgrade probably a dozen or more CPAN modules, although that generally went smoothly. And of course now, I actually set up a cron job to update the rules, which should keep things working nicely.
The results? Instantly, I saw a massive improvement in terms of what SA was able to correctly flag as spam! I got my inbox back! I estimate it’s catching about 95% of the spams that were slipping through prior to the upgrade, now. There’s also a couple false positives I need to deal with (from Bacula, most concerningly), but that is the next mini-project.
As a nice bonus (ok, the real reason I was doing this), the mail on my iPhone is now much more hammy, which makes it infintely more useful as a mail-reader!