Spamassassin postfix how to#

I have to check my spam folder regularly because it gets a ton of false positives these days. Unsurprisingly, GMail also exhibits this problem.

Spamassassin postfix how to#

We support training the classifier in our products, via a couple of different mechanisms, but don't really make it too evident how to enable it and use it, because the result is often a lot of confusion as users break their classifier over time by putting legitimate (but no longer wanted) mail into the spam folder. I find the 'anything I don't like goes into spam' is among the biggest problems for classifying spam using rules shared across users, and has been forever. I find that this considerably reduces the false positives. Instead, you should unsubscribe and put those in the trash folder. For example, you shouldn't train it to classify legitimate newsletters as spam even if they are undesirable. You just have to be persistent and consistent in how you train it and tune it. I find that the good old Bayes classifier is still the most powerful tool in my spam filtering toolbox. More or less zero false positives and maybe a couple of false negatives per week. It turned out that I needed to make the Bayes scores more aggressive, and after I did that, it's been more or less perfect. Some time ago, it began leaking spam into the inbox. Most of the time, this will be email that has already been classified correctly, but if I move an email, it will reclassify it. Anything that appears elsewhere is learned as ham. Anything that appears in the spam folder is learned as spam. I have the same system today, but on top of that, I have a background shell script that watches my mail folders and runs sa-learn on them. Later, I configured it to put the spam in a special IMAP folder. It started out as Qmail/Courier, changed to Postfix/Courier and finally Postfix/Dovecot, always with Spamassassin as the spam filter.įor a while, it was configured to discard spam. I have a mail server for my personal email that I've been maintaining for the better part of a decade.