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Carl -- thanks for the info on the updates. i guess that pretty much leaves "your account being picked up by email harvesters" as the best explanation. i've used this email address for close to ten years, so why all of a sudden it would end up on a bunch of new spam lists that spam assassin is incapable of detecting is somewhat of a mystery. as for "continuously tweak your spamassassin + spam filter combination", a spam filter that has to be continually re-configured by the user is worthless. you might as well spend the time just deleting the spam. anyway, as i said this is not that big of a deal. i'll just delete the stuff and be on my way. i'm just disappointed in spam assassin -- it did such a great job for so long, and now it's useless. i might as well just turn it off. lee

the help desk wasn't much help here. they assured me that spam assassin was up to date, but wouldn't tell me exactly what version is installed -- so whether it's really the latest and greatest, who knows. oh well, this isn't all that big of a deal -- right now the amount of spam is not overwhelming, so i can live with it. but i have to believe that something is broken here -- just makes no sense that spam assassin would go from working so well to virtually not working at all. lee

Thomas -- thanks for the suggestion, but i checked and the headers only show the spam score and status -- no indication of the version being run. i'll check with the help desk and see what they have to say. lee

is there any way to verify the version of Spam Assassin that is running on my server? apparently there have been a couple of recent updates, and i'm wondering if maybe an older version could be part of the problem? also, how often are the rule updates run? any way to see when the last rule update was? according to the documentation, that's something that needs to be done on a regular basis, preferably daily. lee

Bruce -- lowering the criteria score wouldn't do much good -- in fact i would have to then come up with extensive white lists to keep valid mail from getting scored as spam. it looks to me like the scoring algorithm just isn't working as well as it used to. with the score criteria set where it is, it was working quite well up until about a month ago. so something isn't working the way it used to. i have no idea how the SA scoring algorithms work, but it appears that the problem might be in how it's dealing with various blacklists which i'm guessing it uses. quite a bit of the spam that it misses comes through with very similar IP addresses, which i would think would be indicative of spam servers, which i would think SA would be able to spot and thus score high. it's almost like it's not using current spam blacklists. lee

over the last month or so my spam assassin has become almost totally ineffective. for years, i have averaged maybe 5-10 spams per day getting past SA. but now i'm consistently getting 30 or more per day that SA misses. long ago i set SA to auto delete, so in the past i have no idea just how much spam it was catching, but i seem to recall that when i set it to auto delete it was in fact catching a significant amount. but with this recent uptick in spam, i turned off the auto delete to make sure that SA was indeed still working. well, it is working, but it's only catching maybe 3-4 spams per day, while letting 30+ through. is there any reason why all of a sudden spam assassin is doing such a poor job? has it lost it's general effectiveness? lee