Critical Eye on SpamAssassin

ErrorBase writes "In this Infoworld article, Logan G. Harbaugh makes a great deal about an ancient (2.44) version of SpamAssassin comparing it with newer comercial variants. Quote : You get what you pay for. [...] However, it took more than 10 times as long to install and configure SpamAssassin as it did any of the other products. " Why did he not ask Kevin Railsback who had the whole thing working some while ago?)"

Comments

SpamAssassin

[hookedup]

All my incomming mail comes through SpamAssassin (cant remember which version off the top of my head), and once in a blue moon a single piece of spam will manage to find it's way through. When it does, I guess i should just applaud the spammer for being so devious.

TrollAssasin would be nice, imagine seeing posts subjects as *****TROLL***** heh

Because

[FreeLinux]

Why did he not ask Kevin Railsback who had the whole thing working some while ago?)"

He expected to get the results that he normally gets with most commercial software. Click Setup.exe, answer a question or two and it's done, up and running. Further configuration is not required though it may be desired.

The commercial vendors of Spamassassin have not improved the core product in any way. What they have improved is the packaging, the installation, the default configuration and the interface to modify that configuration. The stock SpamAssassin does not offer that although, Spamassassin setup is far more simple than some other packages out there.

Taken from the two articles

[lpontiac]

Kevin Railsback is Test Center operations manager at InfoWorld.

versus

IT consultant Logan Harbaugh is the author of two books on networking.

The first found Spamassassin easy, the second found it hard. Hmmm.

What really aggravates me is the typical "There are blacklists available that you can subscribe to, and some are updated regularly, but these are noncommercial lists with no guarantees." I'd like to see what guarantees the commercial lists come with.

sixty-two percent?

[dboyles]

[SpamAssassin] filtered only 62 percent of spam, whereas the other products produced great results, blocking 90 percent to 96 percent of all the spam they encountered with few, if any, legitimate messages blocked.

To me, this statement is pretty telling. Harbaugh must get some completely different kinds of spam than me, because, even though I receive about 60 spam mails a day (directed to my "spam" folder, so I never see them until I scan the "From:" field and then delete them), maybe one per week makes it through the filter. And seeing as how I can't even remember the last time I got a false positive, that's a pretty damn good number.

I can believe that if you receive a variety of mail and if you took no time to configure SpamAssassin other than cranking it up, maybe then it'll only catch 80% of the spam. But 62%? I'm not sure if Harbaugh is skewing the benchmarks or if he just doesn't know what he's doing.

There are some legitimate issues with SpamAssassin that might not make it ready for the enterprise, but for a handful of users, I have been more than satisfied. And the price is right.