Bubbles in the Bathtub

Probably because it appeared in Der Spiegel and other German news outlets. So now not only am I getting the usual dose of spam, but I am getting a bunch of new spam in German. Woo-hoo!

Btw, I am a big fan of SpamAssassin. If your service provider doesn't already use it, ask for it by name. It is the new default spam filter for all mail coming into the seaturtle.org server (and all of the domains hosted therein).

Each incoming message is analyzed by spamassassin and gets a score. The higher the score the more likely the message is spam. I have it set up so that any messages with a very high number are automatically directed to the bit bucket. Those that are in between get redirected to a special mailbox so that I can check them to make sure that nothing non-spammy is getting caught. Those with lower scores just go on through to the user as usual.

I recently discovered the Bayesian filtering option in spamassasin and it works wonders. You basically save examples of messages that are spam and not-spam and use it to "train" spamassassin to recognize the difference between the two. I used to get 100 or more spam messages a day. Now I am down to a handful, and those are usually only getting through because they are new types of spam. For a point of reference, I was out of town for the last week or so and so messages built up in the spam trap for about 7 days. When I emptied it out this morning there were more than 650 messages in it (no false positives!!!). That doesn't include all the messages with really high scores that were automatically deleted, I'm extrapolating here, but possibly another 3000+ messages in just one week!!! ( that's for all seaturtle.org mail accounts, not just me :)

It's nice to have access to (free!) tools like spamassassin, but what a pain!