Last night, I was updating some packages on our server. Among these was SpamAssassin. The update shut down the spam filter daemon, and I did not notice this. Until this morning, when my inbox was full of spam.

Spam filter is off for one night (~12 hours), and I get 71 spams. As opposed to the normal 2 or 3 per day that actually make it to my inbox. Kudos to the SpamAssassin developers for such an excellent product.

This is just to say that I like SpamAssassin. I’ve been running it on my mail server for the last few months, and found it to be rather robust. I’ve never received a false positive, and my wife has received only a few. It also blocks the vast majority of spam - a handful of messages trickle past it into my inbox.

I’ve found that I’m able to trust it enough that anything to my address with a spam score of 10 or higher automatically hits the bit bucket (5 or higher gets stashed in my spam folder).