CFCL motd

Changes to Spam Processing

Occasionally, cfcl is hit with a higher-than-usual amount of spam. Combined with everything else we do, that slows the performance to unacceptable levels. We've recently made some changes to try to prevent this problem in the future.

Henceforth, spam checking will be done on our "email toaster" box. This is the system that already does a lot of email pre-processing, rejecting mail addressed to non-existent addresses on our system. (These false addresses account for about 99% of our incoming traffic.)

This machine will now handle running SpamAssassin on (properly addressed) mail. It works like this:

• Mail with a score of 15 or higher will be deleted. According to the SpamAssassin docs, mail with a score of 15 or higher is almost certainly spam (with 0.05% false positives) according to rules/STATISTICS.txt).
• Messages scoring between 10 and 15 will be diverted to a shared, dated "spam" box in /usr/local/mail/spam on the toaster. If you think you've lost something because "the spam checker ate it", ask.
• Messages scoring between 8 and 10 will be diverted to your personal "spam" box (a named subdirectory of /usr/local/mail/spam) on cfcl. Again, If you think you've lost something because "the spam checker ate it", ask.
• Messages scoring less than 8 will be delivered. If you would like to lower this threshold, please ask.