Fun with spam

Well now that I have been working with getting Kolab to handle my spam and virus issues I think I have finally found a nice solution. A few weeks ago when I was testing my email spam filters here I went out on usenet and posted my name a few times. Now that I get about 1500 spam messages a day I have a very nice test set ;)

So I installed Spam Assassin and dSpam both on my server so I could give them a whirl. Spam Assassin was easy to install but it was a real hog on resources and seems to catch more real mail than spam.... as I tried to tune it, it just drove me nuts.

Next we installed dSpam on our server. This was a little bit harder to install and training took about two weeks. Now about 10-20 spams a day get through, and about 1500 are caught. dSpam also seems very light and fast compared to other spam filter solutions. There are so far no false positives past the first few days so this is a nice bonus.

So here is the issue... dSpam, its maintance intensive, you have to train it, and clean the databases,etc... its annoying, but damn effective. SpamAssassin, was easy to install, but proved itself pretty useless in a few days. For the amount of tweaking, dSpam soon became less offensive. But, will users train their dSpam? Are they annoyed enough with spam that they will train their filter and keep on top of the 5 or 6 spams that get through? Not sure... we need to figure this out.

I think if KMail would make using a remote Bayesian filter easier it could be doable... but still a "drop in" solution like Spam Assassin is attractive...

Any opinions from the peanut gallery?