I'm not the expert on this and someone from the mail.msu team who is needs
to jump in, but it is my understanding that (a) we have been using
SpamAssassin on mail.msu since day-1, (b) spam filtering is turned off by
default and most users have NOT turned it on, (c) our spam-threshold
settings are somewhat conservative -- i.e., we tend toward more
false-negatives (letting spam through) to avoid too many false-positives
(trapping content that people actually want to receive). In fact,
SpamAssassin is only one of several layers of spam filtering deployed in
mail.msu.
Point C is important: the broader the user base the more conservative spam
threshold settings need to be to make sure that people get the mail they
want to get. The more local and narrowly-defined the user base, the more
specific the spam settings can become and the more effective the filtering.
If one sets filtering just for oneself, it could be made to work almost
perfectly, but few other people would accept the same definition of
perfection. I think this spam-management trade-off issue is often missed
when people compare the relative effectiveness of spam filtering at
different levels of user scale and scope.
- Dave
John Valenti writes:
> Dak,
>
> This is somewhat interesting because the central MSU email system has
> been using SpamAssassin for many years. (since the cut-over from Pilot
> email, I think).
>
> It would be interesting to compare the settings that Music is using,
> versus the settings on msu.edu.
>
> Are you sure the people that are getting so much spam thru msu.edu have
> gone into Preferences and picked an option to throw away spam? I think
> letting everything thru is still the default setting.
>
> My email address is very old (ie, it is probably on many spammer's lists)
> and I only get a few spam per day thru msu.edu.
>
> -John
> LIR
>
>
> On July 1, at 11:49 AM July 1, Dak Aldrich wrote:
>
>> Ya know, Matrix is running SpamAssassin before our email server. Do you
>> know that I have NEVER ONCE gotten one of these emails? Unfortunately,
>> we
>> can't afford to have all Music faculty on our exchange system, yet.
>> So... Of
>> course, they keep getting them and like... Well... Some users... They
>> actually send the info. So far, we've caught it before anything
>> happens,
>> and are able to change the password.
>>
>> I've noticed that a lot of users are getting a lot of spam that I do
>> not.
>> Is there any plan to look at or consider a change to the spam filtering
>> or
>> the entire system that MSU uses? Honestly, I don't think I could handle
>> using my MSU account these days with all the crap others are getting. I
>> get
>> MAYBE 6 or 7 spam a week with our setup. And I've got MSU users that
>> are
>> getting 50 a day.
>>
>> Just curious.
>>
>> -dak
>> -Network Admin
>> -College of Music, MSU
>
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