Well, after about a week of testing SpamAssassin 3.0, I decided I was ready to transition the college to the lastest version. In the past week I have been very happy with the way the new version is working. My only complaint is that they reduced the score for BAYES_99 to 1.9 instead of the 5.4 it was before. That difference was enought to let a few spam messages into my inbox a day. However I discovered that if I add a “score BAYES_99 4.00” to my user_prefs file, SpamAssassin will once again catch those pesky spam messages.
One of the really cool features this version has that is new is the URIBL’s. Just like regular block lists, this too is a list of hosts to block. Only this time it is a list of links contained in spam. Thus if spam comes in with some URL’s in it, and those URL’s are listed in the URIBL’s, the spam score will rise significantly.
Another great feature is SPF. As we and lots of places on the net are now publishing SPF records, this should help SpamAssassin identify legitimate email. For more info on SPF, see http://spf.pobox.com/
So far, I’d have to say I am happy with the results of the upgrade and hope that everyone else who uses it is as well. I’d be glad to hear your feedback.