[Techtalk] spam filters

[Maria McKinley]

Akkana Peck wrote:
<snip a bunch of stuff>
> 
> # The ALL_TRUSTED test seems to trust everybody, including dynamic
> # IPs from random ISPs like c-71-201-212-73.hsd1.il.comcast.net.
> score ALL_TRUSTED       0
> 

I've been playing with the spam filters again, and going through the 
emails all of you helpful people sent about spam filters, and I have now 
learned something about the ALL_TRUSTED test, which others might be 
interested in.

It seems that if you use a NAT translater the filter gets confused, and 
thinks everything that appears to be from a private network (or some 
other random ips, which I couldn't figure out) should be trusted, so you 
need to tell the spam filter what it should trust, otherwise, Akkana is 
correct, and it will give lots of spam a trusted score. I added 
something like the following to my local.cf:

trusted_networks 123.456.789.0/25
trusted_networks 10.456.789.0/25

and it has made a big difference. It seems there are some reasons to set 
this up correctly, instead of just turning it off:

http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/FixingAllTrusted
http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/TrustPath
http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/Rules/ALL_TRUSTED?action=show&redirect=ALL+TRUSTED

cheers,
maria