[LINK] Spam filter eliminates 99% of junk mail

[Tom Worthington]

I did a quick check to see if my SpamAssassin Spam filter was 
working. The result was that the filter is catching 99% of the Spam, 
which makes up 96% of the email I receive. No messages were 
incorrectly classified as Spam.

The Spam filter set up to delete high rating messages from the server 
before they get to my computer.  But I was curious to see how well 
the filter was working. So I had the Spam rated messages put in a folder.

On Thursday morning I had 605 messages, of which 573 SpamAssassin 
gave a Spam rating of higher than 2. I had a quick look through the 
50 lowest rating of these, but did not find any which appeared to be 
other than junk. I was therefore comfortable to delete all messages 
with a rating of more than 2.

I then looked through the remaining 32 messages not rated as Spam by 
the system. Of these, seven I considered to be Spam.

The Spam filter appears to be working very well. I could make it more 
sensitive, but seven junk messages a day is acceptable.

ps: This does not include virus laden email. I was not willing to 
turn off the virus filter, which deletes messages with virus 
attachments before they get to the spam filter.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, ANU