New spam fools spam assassin

[Paul]

Since spam assassin is so good at avoiding false positives, we routinely turn on the "just delete any tagged messages" feature and the clients are extremely happy!

Lately, though, I think the spammers have discovered ways to get around the numerous checks that spam assassin does.  One client today showed me the 200 spam messages she got that spam assassin didn't detect.  The default trigger is 5, and most of these were under 2.

Is this just the nature of this problem these days, or is there a solution?

[WHSP-Jarrod]

Hi Paul,

Sadly, when it comes to spam prevention, we're always playing a game of catch-up.  Spammers have the ability to analyze and reverse engineer available anti-spam tools such as SpamAssassin, giving them ways to eventually get around them.  Once they do this, those anti-spam tools are updated to become more effective, but the process repeats.

Depending on the severity of the problem, you have a few different options available.  The easiest would simply be to wait until the SpamAssassin developers release an update to their software, which should stop the majority of this new spam which is making its' way past.  Alternatively, we offer a closed-source anti-spam tool by the name of Postini, which this a third-party service that we make available to our customers.

Postini isn't in the same boat as SpamAssassin, as it's a hosted service, meaning that spammers aren't able to gain access to their code and thusly have a considerably harder time of getting their junk past the Postini filters.  We have further information on Postini available on our website at the following address: http://webhsp.com/support/support-postini.html

Another alternative would be to further reduce the required score within SpamAssassin, however that does present the risk of having some legitimate mail filtered out on you.

If you have any further questions about SpamAssassin, Postini or anything else, just let us know!

[Paul]

Thanks for the information, Jarrod.

When you say, "wait until the SpamAssassin developers release an update to their software," does that mean that, if and when they do, it will get installed on all the HSP machines?  We have both a shared host account on Varsity and a VPS.  Are these updates regularly released?

Thanks again.

[WHSP-Jarrod]

Hi Paul,

Our shared servers (and most of our VPS' for that matter) are running cPanel as a control panel system, which will automatically be updated with the newest version of SpamAssassin as soon as it's made available.  Our servers are all running the "upcp" command nightly, so as soon as this new version of SpamAssassin is built into cPanel and made available as a "Release" version, our servers will all be automatically upgraded.

If your VPS is not running cPanel, and you wish to have SpamAssassin upgraded, just submit a ticket to the Helpdesk and we'll get it upgraded for you as soon as a new version is made available.