Spamassassin Correct ?

[Michael Cohen]

On Wed, Apr 04, 2007 at 06:58:44PM +0930, Garry Trethewey wrote:
> Dunno if this is strictly linux stuff, but I'll reply to this list.
> 
> Loss via spam filters has become an issue for us. My wife & I work for 
> state & local government. We've both lost stuff between work and home, 
> and I've found (too late) I've lost quite important stuff from collegues.
> 
> I believe spam filters are often turned up to max sensitivity. Where I 
> work, having porn is a sackable offence, so it's understandable.
> 
> Dunno what to do about it - I've tried the footer below, nobody takes 
> any notice. Perhaps turn down the sensitivity, learn to tolerate a 
> certain amount of garbage, but in the paranoid climate I just mentioned, 
> that's not going to happen.
> 
> Im interested in any thoughts people have.
> Garry

Garry,
  I tend to use spam filters to just tag the mail as spam on the subject line.
  It helps me quickly identify the spam email but there are a couple of cases
  where emails have been mis-tagged. There are also lots of spam email which
  are not getting tagged either (false positive and false negatives). 

  Generally I think my life is easier because I use a very good mail user agent
  (namely mutt). With mutt you can see more of the subject line very quickly
  and visually recognise spam (some spam uses weird charsets for example). Im
  saying this because I have to use outlook at work and I dont believe that its
  suitable for processing more than a few dozen emails per day (maybe its just
  the gui that is limited). I currently get between 50-200 spam mails per day
  and probably take a total of 2-3 minutes deleting them. So thats not too bad.

  Subject tagging does make the processes much quicker. Very rarely I delete a
  legit email which was tagged as spam because I didnt look closely at it - but
  thats a reality of modern email, that it is inherently an unreliable
  transport - if its important just resend it.

  Michael