[horde] Sam - SpamAssassin module

[Niels Dettenbach]

Am Montag 15 November 2010, 16:15:55 schrieb Rick Romero:
> I would only agree on the assumption that you are using a single DB for
> your entire userbase.  I love getting 'Spam Alerts' from AOL that contain
> things like wedding invitations and email that has some word or phrase
> that obviously offended the user.
"Spam Alerts" are trash as mails with a "[spam]" marking in their subject are 
trash, they just waste bandwidth and - not at least - energy. 

If i would receive a email which is marked as "spam" in my inbox i have to 
check if that is right and i have no work time and no bandwidth saving in the 
sum. Might be there are users out which are happy to find such modified or 
damaged mails in their inboxes. This is not professional nor helpful for 
anyone.

Not at least - such subject "marks" damaging emails (i.e. signed, list traffic 
etc.) and it seems the modified subject mainly should help to sell any 
commercial antispam product.

> If he is using SpamAssassin on a per-user basis, then that elimitates the
> people who think 'Spam' = "Mail I don't want" from tainting other's
> opinions.
No,
this just eleminates that others are treaten by the results of the "stupidity" 
of other users - it did not eleminate their own "stupidity".

Typical end users ARE "stupid" if they have to think in what is spam and what 
not. If they don't want email from any sender they have the option to block 
that sender by ingo (SIEVE or any other filter backend) and they know that 
they block emails with that sender.

(fully independent from that is not a solution as it wastes bandwidth - the 
solution is to unsubscribe from that list.)

Your conclusion is right if users get the option to filter against rules they 
understand - like with ingo.

If they feed a complex anti-spam solution like spamassassin, they did not know 
what spamassassin is doing with their complains and it WILL leads to false 
positives and a unreliable anti-spam solution which really saves time and 
money in any way... I did not believe that your users all are smtp and anti-
spam experts in any way.

> It also allows people to accept or deny bulk mail based on
> their own preferences.  IMHO, it changes the entire concept of
> 'Spam-detection' into 'types of mail I don't like-detection'.  It's up
> to you whether or not that's the way you want to go.  
> 
> Personally, I have had better luck with per-user training than one common
> database.

Yes,
using user based spamfilter trainings is "better" then a general / central 
base which get feeded by all users - but it only works if you / the users did 
understand how spamassassin works in detail. 

But if your end users hardly rely on email communication (and the spam is 
really bounced / filtered which is the only option to save work time with spam 
filtering) it is a bad idea to let users train a system which they can't 
understand in basics nor in details.


cheers,


Niels.

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  Niels Dettenbach
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