minutia press.

Our computer systems have recently been augmented with a nifty piece of software called Spam Assassin. Spam Assassin claims to be a wide-spectrum spam-o-cide, and there's an image of some frightening, Ninja-like characters at the top of the page to back this up.

First, it seems to me that equipping our computers with a Spam Assassin is a bit premature. I would think a prudent first step would be Spam Deterrent. If that doesn't do the trick, how about a little Spam Embargo? And of course, the U.N. could always send over a troup of Spam Inspectors to make sure that certain parties are not developing the capability of launching inter-continental, biologically viable spam.

Spam Assassin uses some preconceived filters that look for certain phrases in your email (sex, Nigeria, upcoming departmental standing-committee meeting), and then scores a particular piece of email with a "hit" count. One can customize the filter so that Spam Assassin marks e-mail as "Spam" based on the quality or quantity of hits.

An email identified as Spam is augmented with about a page of header information explaining just how Spam Assassin evaluated the spamosity of the email on its spam-o-meter.

An analogy might go like this. Suppose somebody went around to everybody's postal mailbox and looked for junk mail. If a piece of mail were evaluated to have sufficient junkosity on the junk-o-meter, then this person would place the alleged junk mail in a thick, well-sealed envelope, and write all the reasons on the outside that the mail should go unexamined (sex, Nigeria, notices about departmental standing-committee meetings).

All of this is well and good if you are disciplined and unfailingly honor Spam Assassin's evaluation of what you should and should not read. The problem is: Spam Assassin sometimes misses its mark. I have had email completely devoid of sex, Nigerian bank scams, and information about departmental standing-commitee meetings) falsely accused of spamness. And with explanations of its thinking that rival Faulkner in their magnitude, wading through Spam now takes me 3 times longer than before.

And then I find that innocent mail I have sent has been libelled as spam. The mail was sent to a friend of mine who runs a biotech firm, suggesting that the two of us get together for a stick and puck session at Creve Coeur. He didn't get my mail because his corporate Spam Assassin thought my mail was spam.

I guess I would rather receive all of my mail, even those regarding websites devoted to brutal rape videos which I have been receiving with alarming alacrity lately, then miss out on important correspondance like "Chris, your fantasy football team sucks" or "CEC Mailserver will be down between the hours of 7 AM and 9 PM for the next week because of construction workers chewing on cables".

I installed spam assassin a few days ago, and I've been pretty happy with it. But my setup is a bit odd since I use procmail and do some rather extensive whitelisting before I let spam assassin loose on the remainder of my email. Anyway, my advice would be to create some whitelisted email addresses if you want a better response out of spam assassin.

Spam Assassim usually marks the mail with an X-SPAM_FLAG or something like that so perhaps moving all such marked mail to a different folder for later perusal makes sure you don't lose important mail :-) At least that is what I do and it works !