The 2-Minute Guide to tripling SpamAssassin's effectiveness

Thanks for the tip.

Happy to help! :)

dave

According to discussion on the SA mail list that indicates SURBL is a better solution than custom rules (in particular bigevil.cf). Check out http://www.surbl.org.

Even easier is to setup the Rules Du Jour script in your /etc/cron.daily/ and have the new rules downloaded every day if there are changes it even mails you a nice little summary when done.

http://www.exit0.us/index.php/RulesDuJour

The SpamAssassin rulesets bigevil.cf and sa-blacklist have essentially merged and have since become very large. They are so large now that on machines with moderate memory, bigevil in particular can now crash SpamAssassin due to running out of memory.

The authors of those rules recommend using SURBLs instead, in particular ws.surbl.org, which contains all of the same domains as bigevil.cf, sa-blacklist and some other lists, in SURBL form. ws.surbl.org runs with a much smaller memory footprint and also uses less CPU since all that's needed is a simple RBL-style DNS lookup instead of running through tens of thousands of regular expressions for every incoming message.

Other SURBL lists, all highly effective against spam since they list the domains from spam message body URIs, are described at: http://www.surbl.org/

This message was edited Jul 25, 2004 3:35 PM This message was edited Jul 25, 2004 3:46 PM

Excellent information; thank you Jeff! I'll be updating my own system with this information.

best, dave