Spam Assassin Score Reduced (15th March 2012)
I’ve now reduced the threshold to 3 on both my POP3 accounts. We’ll see how it goes.
Genuine messages are usually scored less than 0 – the highest I saw was only 1.5! Windows Live Mail was my tool of choice to see this information. (Definitely my new favourite e-mail system. You can still View Source with it, too.)
Using it to check the Properties of some Asian-language spam with suspicious attachments showed me the Bayes filter alone was always scoring 3.5, which is 99% chance of being spam. Further checks were often scoring them up to 4.3.
By default, Spam Assassin would only delete messages before they reached me if their spam score was 5 or above. That’s actually quite hard to reach.
Initially the auto-deletion feature wasn’t turned on but it’s been running a couple of years.