SARE SpamAssassin Rules

[movielad]

Having ran my own cPanel server a few months ago, I found I had great success cutting down spam by utilising rulesets from SARE - the SpamAssassin Rules Emporium (http://www.rulesemporium.com).

Since moving mail from another provider to Hostgator, I've discovered that I'm receiving much more spam than I used to - many of which falls dramatically under my spam score of 4.2.

Another thing is that it would be nice to have a mechanism whereby it's easy to run sa-learn on existing spam so as to train SpamAssassin. I used to do this under a shell script by copying and pasting sample spam into a text file in my user area and then running sa-learn. Of course we don't have SSH access so it makes that part a lot harder

Anything that gives us a bit more power with SpamAssassin settings and rulesets would be greatly appreciated.

M.

[nlstart]

Custom rule sets would be very handy.
See http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/CustomRulesets. Would something like that be possible on the HostGator cPanel?

[Serra]

I'm currently running SARE and my own custom rules and I'm finding them much better than SA alone. The bad thing is that any changes to SA are system wide, so it isn't really possible for nondedicated users to use SARE or custom rules.

The best thing for nondedicated users is to get a local spam scanning program and scan the email as it comes in.

[nlstart]

Originally Posted by Serra

The bad thing is that any changes to SA are system wide, so it isn't really possible for nondedicated users to use SARE or custom rules.

I understand that. That's why I was curious about applying extra rules for myself. Could you give a short roadmap of how to set up extra rules like you did? Or maybe you know a link to documentation about this for HG? (I searched but couldn't find...)

Originally Posted by Serra

The best thing for nondedicated users is to get a local spam scanning program and scan the email as it comes in.

I'm not with you nor against you on this point. As a (tiny) host provider I would like to give my customers almost no spam; I would like to take the hassle to keep rules up-to-date and stuff and monitor their spam. Some users of my customers really wouldn't know how to install, update and/or upgrade a local scanning program; they are already happy I got their current mail program working! Neither do they have the interest to do so.
Also they are hopeless victims for any click-me mails and could be easily become victims of phising, as they just can't tell the difference...

So, for some users I would like to protect them, before they complain to me!

[Serra]

Originally Posted by nlstart

I understand that. That's why I was curious about applying extra rules for myself. Could you give a short roadmap of how to set up extra rules like you did? Or maybe you know a link to documentation about this for HG? (I searched but couldn't find...)

Applying custom rules, like the SARE rule set is fairly simple. What you want to do is search for RulesDuJour. RulesDuJour will show how to install the SARE rules with an autoupdate. If you re using RulesDuJour, you can add your own custom rules into RulesDuJour's update.

Originally Posted by nlstart

I'm not with you nor against you on this point. As a (tiny) host provider I would like to give my customers almost no spam; I would like to take the hassle to keep rules up-to-date and stuff and monitor their spam. Some users of my customers really wouldn't know how to install, update and/or upgrade a local scanning program; they are already happy I got their current mail program working! Neither do they have the interest to do so.
Also they are hopeless victims for any click-me mails and could be easily become victims of phising, as they just can't tell the difference...

As a small reseller, you need to get out of the shared environment and into a dedicated server. That is a MUST do action. You can NOT serve your customers from a shared account. Its that simple.

I'm not saying that you can't provide excellent service from a smaller reseller account, you can. I did for a while myself. My customers were very happy with my service. On the other hand, on a shared account, your customers are not getting the service they deserve, its that simple.

It you really want to provide the level of service you need, then look into MailScanner. That is the solution you need. Again, you can't do anything from a shared account.