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Comment by acidburnNSA | Hacker News Reader

FWIW I've been using SpamAssassin for over a decade personally (partly to avoid Google dependence), and it's been pretty darn good once I ran the Bayesian learning thing a few times many years ago. I get like 3-5 spams per week in my inbox. Do others really consider SA that bad?

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FastMail uses SpamAssassin, and I get less than one spam emails in my inbox a month, with essentially zero false positives (which is the tricky bit where gmail seems to fail – I'd rather have the occasional spam in my email than false positives).

In short: you can probably do better than 3-5 spams per week with SA.

The big problem is the entire thing is a beast to configure with all the documentation of a Babylonian cuneiform stone tablet.

I hate to agree here, but configuring SpamAssassin is pretty rough. That being said, once its done, its pretty bulletproof and doesnt usually require messing with it all the time.

> I get like 3-5 spams per week in my inbox

I'm more curious about the opposite metric: how many non-spam emails a week arent getting delivered to you? Because that seems to be the real flaw in spamassassin: the false positive rate.

And the spamassassin users don't usually have much visibility into this, so when emails don't get to them they just blame the sender.

> how many non-spam emails a week arent getting delivered to you?

My false-positive rate is very low, maybe a couple per month. However, I can predict with a high degree of accuracy when a piece of email is likely to land in the spam folder. Things like confirmation emails, registration emails, etc. are guaranteed to land in the spam folder. It's pretty hard for any system to accommodate those without allowing spam to get by.

That's fine by me, though, because I know when to check my spam folder.

Fastmail user here, so SpamAssassin I assume: virtually no false positives. My GMail spam folder is generally 50/50 false and true positives. I really can't use that email for anything as having to go to the spam folder every day defeats the purpose of an anti-spam filter.

On Gmail I get maybe 1 spam a month max in my inbox (and it blocks many per day)

That's pretty good. I have no doubt that Gmail spam protection is better than my self-hosted SA protection. For me, independence from a somewhat suspicious large company for something as important as e-mail is worth it.

I have a gmail honeypot where I fetchmail junk email straight to my junk folder and have a scheduled sa-learn cronjob. Ever since I started this I essentially stopped getting junk email in my selfhosted inbox.

I also have dovecot set to learn Ham every time I file an email from the inbox to a folder for good measure.

So...statistically insignificant difference from SA for most mail users.

3-5 spams per week vs. 1 per month is a big difference

I got (if I'm reading this right) 5500 emails (junk+delivered) to my personal mail account from 12/01/2023 to 12/31/2023. So that's a minimum, since I don't see the ones that get flushed out before I even see them.

1 spam a month would be .018% of emails and 5 x 4 spams a month would be .364% of emails

So I would have gotten about .346% more spam based on the number of emails. In reality, because I don't see all of the mails, it's less. Is a touch more than a third of a percent a 'big difference'? YMMV.

It's a 20x difference... My annoyance by spam is unrelated to the detection rate and is entirely related to the number of spam emails I see

I find SA works excellently, personally.

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