I am looking at updating my email stack after a number of years and am wondering what to do for anti-spam. Is Spamassassin still the best option, or is there something better nowadays?
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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters IMAP Internet Message Access Protocol for email LTS Long Term Support software version SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
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I’m not really confident in this answer but, “not that I’m aware of”.
I use mxroute as a paid / hosted IMAP & SMTP server. They run spam assassin, but it’s obviously not trained on my own reports.
I’ve grown fond of Thunderbird as an email client. It’s spam management is clunky but if you spend 15 minutes or so learning how it works, and then train it with both junk and not junk, it works reasonably well.
Sadly, it does occasionally throw a false positive, like maybe twice in the last year it identified a legit email as spam.
So, while I’m running a spam assassin and thunderbird combo, it’s really TB that’s doing the work because SA is really just filtering the super low hanging fruit.
TB is doing a very respectable job, but needs to be trained.
I’ve used SA for over 10 years and am happy with it. It’s a bit of a pain to get set up and set to train, but otherwise still works well for me.
I’ve also heard good things about rspamd but I still haven’t even tried it out yet.
unfortunate acronym.
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I switched to rspamd. Its bayesian filter is a little weird. It only started working ok after I found the right amount of mails to feed to it. For some reason it forgot everything if I gave it too many mails. I think it’s a Redis thing. No idea. I don’t have the brain power to figure it out or write a proper bug report. But I think my Debian version is outdated anyways, so this might be fixed by now.
For my server learning from mails from the last 50 days was the sweet spot. Since then I got no false positives and only the occasional false negative. Exactly how I want my spam filter to be.
rspamd
I use SpamAssassin. It’s fine, but definitely needs training. I might look into migrating to rspamd as it seems better, but I don’t have time atm.
Not that I know of. (But if there is, I’d very much like to learn about that!)
