I’ve recently enabled SpamAssassin on my mail server and it’s incredible how efficient it is.
The filter will run on the mail server itself and not the mail client on your machine and it basically gives ‘points’ to mails depending on the criteria they match.
If the threshold you set is reached, the mail is classified as spam and you can either delete it on the server and you won’t even see it in your mailbox, redirect it to another mail account or receive it but with a tag (***SPAM*** is added to the subject).
I personally find dangerous to delete the mail directly if you are worried about false positive (mail being detected as spam while it’s not), although it never happened to me.
Instead, I use my mail client to move the mails tagged as ***SPAM*** directly into a folder, so that I can delete everything at once.
Actually, before deleting them, I also like to read the mails themselves. Not really because I’m worried about false positive ones, but more because SpamAssassin adds the details of the points given to the mail and it’s actually kind of fun to see what tricks the spammers use.
The highest score a mail got so far is 46.4, while only 7 are required to be classified as spam in my configuration!
As you can see in the list of tests performed on incoming mails, there is not much chance for spam to get through!
And if SpamAssassin is not able to detect the mail as spam, the junk filter on Thunderbird usually takes care of that 🙂
Question about your webhost.
Hi. I’ve been shopping around for a new webhosting company with which to place my webpage. I see you chose Zighost and had some good things to say about them early on. I’m looking into choosing Zighost as well, and wanted your comments on the positives and negatives you’ve experienced with them. Thanks!
Hi,
So far, I’m very satisfied with zighost. The access is very fast, the server has a very acceptable uptime, they give unlimited bandwidth and most importantly, they provide ssh access to the server.
Now, the only things I’m a little worried about:
– there seems to be only one server as of now. I’m wondering how the service will degrade when there are too many users
– the mail server’s configuration was a little off last month and all emails sent to my account where rejected, with an error message saying that the IP address of the sender had been banned. The service was up after a little more than 12 hours, but I’m sure I lost some emails …
– when you make a backup of your site, the backup file is saved in your own filesystem, which may actually make your space quota go over the limit. That means that potentially, you cannot make a tar.gz file if your site if larger than half the size you paid for
Apart from that, honestly, I’ve been very happy with the service and I would highly recommend it.