Mark L. Kahnt wrote:
[...] SpamAssassin 2.43-1 - tried upgrading it tied to unstable and it says that I'm at the newest version. Basically, it was clobbering anything in html on a commercial mailing list, such as personalised horoscopes. These usually have some promotion of features on the originating website - enough to trigger spam filtering. Unfortunately, my attempts to rescue these with whitelisted addresses has proven useless as I'd said, because by my experience, SpamAssassin doesn't always read or apply that list.
My situation may be similar to yours. I'm on about 40 commercial mailing lists of various types, including yahoogroups which include all manner of advertising, web bugs and other 'spammish' content.
It's worth noting that matching the whitelist only DECREMENTS the score applied against a particular message. It doesn't automatically make the message "good". There are various settings to further tweak whitelist entries (see the manpage for Mail::Spamassassin::Config and the whitelist_to, more_spam_to and all_spam_to entries. Depending on how your mailing list works, this may be all the correction required. The defaults are:
score USER_IN_WHITELIST_TO -6 score USER_IN_MORE_SPAM_TO -20 score USER_IN_ALL_SPAM_TO -100These only match on message sent TO you however. There's also a "whitelist_from_received" option that may be needed to match for mailing lists if the To: line isn't meaningful.
It's also worth spending a few minutes debugging the rules spamassassin applies to a particular list. If a mailing list changes sending address frequently, or doesn't address message To: you, the whitelist entries can easily be missed altogether. If you check and see that a particular rule is catching most of the list mailings you want to see, you can override the scoring for that rule. For example, I have a separate account that I use for mailings lists and other "risky" exchanges. In it, I've tweaked a few rules in ~/.spamassasin/user_prefs to avoid false positives (or rather allow what would otherwise be spam) to this account (defaults shown in parens):
score CTYPE_JUST_HTML 2.459 (0.407) score LOTS_OF_CC_LINE 3.060 (0.817) score SUSPICIOUS_RECIPS 5 (0.931) score VERY_SUSP_RECIPS 5.262 (0.326) score EGP_HTML_BANNER -6.039 (-3.052)(Rule names can be derived from the report.) And of course, if everything seems to be JUST BARELY crossing the spam threshold (default 5), you can tweak that as well:
required_hits n.nnWith these tweaks, and a couple of whitelist & blacklist entries, things have been working very well for me with only minimal maintenance.I do still file spam in a folder and review it before final deletion, as there are still the occasional "spams I want" coming from lists.
I've come to the conclusion that the high number of false positives I was getting weren't due to spamassassin, but rather from the fact that I do like SOME spam. :)
Good luck with it! - Bob