One way that SpamAssassin spots spam is by using statistical (Bayesian) analysis. This requires lots of training data to work properly.
Sometimes this analysis will make mistakes, and you'll want to perform the electronic equivalent of slapping it with a newspaper. The way to do that is to deposit misclassified mail in special system-wide IMAP folders, one called SiteSpam for spam that SpamAssassin missed and one called SiteHam for good messages that were erroneously marked as spam.
If you ever run into this situation, here's how you can feed our system-wide trainer:
First, this is only going to work if you are using IMAP (our webmail is using IMAP, so that can be used). If you're not, or if you have other sources of spam or ham that you'd like handled specially, place a support request on the portal.
Use your IMAP client's "subscribe" feature to subscribe to SiteSpam and/or SiteHam, which should appear in the SpamAssassin mailbox inside the shared tree. If you don't see the shared tree, then file a support request.
- When you want a message to be used as an example of spam or ham, place a copy of it in the appropriate folder.
- Every five minutes, our faithful spamhound will sniff these folders, update its data, and clear their contents.
If you would like to automate this process somewhat, check out FeedingSpamAssassin. For the curious and the sysadmins out there, SpamAssassinAdmin gives more details on how we set this up.