SpamAssassin Scoring - What do you use?

[cchang]

With the recent upgrade of SpamAssassin to version 3.1.1, I am curious as to what threshold/score people are using to mark incoming messages as spam?

I am currently using a score of 3.9 as a threshold, but I am finding increasing amounts of spam slipping through the net :grr:

[Melissa]

On the well-established email account I use the most for valid communications, I have SA set at 2 (and have for some time now). But I also have all of the important email addresses/domains I want to hear from whitelisted to try to ensure they never get caught (and, to my knowledge, they never have). At this score, I get on average one to four spam emails a day that make it through. (I don't have an average count on how many are being caught as I have SA set to delete.) Soon, I will probably lower the required score to 1.5 as it looks like doing so would get most of the remaining as well.

Anyone else's mileage may vary, of course. When experimenting, I would suggest setting the action to Redirect or Tag Only to monitor the results. Then, when confident, you may wish to set it to Delete.

[Buck]

My accounts are at 3.1, and have been for a couple of years. I use a script to redirect any that are in the range of 3.1 to 5.0, and delete anything above 5.0. I've been happy with the results, and out of my 10 accounts, I usually only see a dozen or less SPAM messages a day. The most recent SA upgrade certainly helped cut my SPAM significantly. I was seeing a bunch come through on the low end that were obviously SPAM, but now they're being effectively filtered.

[cchang]

On the well-established email account I use the most for valid communications, I have SA set at 2 (and have for some time now). But I also have all of the important email addresses/domains I want to hear from whitelisted to try to ensure they never get caught (and, to my knowledge, they never have).

Melissa & Buck - thanks for sharing.

I have adopted the approach used by Melissa and will monitor my spam account situation for any false positives (I have set up SpamAssassin for tag only at this stage). Fingers crossed!!

[cchang]

My accounts are at 3.1, and have been for a couple of years. I use a script to redirect any that are in the range of 3.1 to 5.0, and delete anything above 5.0.

How difficult is it to set up such a script? Are there any examples of such a script floating around?

Thanks,
Colin

[sheila]

How difficult is it to set up such a script? Are there any examples of such a script floating around?

Discussions of such a script can be found in these forums...here's what I found in a search:
http://www.aota.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=12912
http://www.aota.net/forums/showthread.php?postid=88615#post88615
http://aota.net/forums/showthread.php?t=15875