@grumpybozo@toad.social2025-09-18 14:38:14
We are NOT AMUSED.
If you're hosted by Aceville, you're dead to me.
#Sysadminnery #SpamAssassin #AIBots
![screenshot from the VM used for SpamAssassin RuleQA. It shows the runn of the command 'w' which reveals one logged in user and triple-digit load averages.
Raw Text:
root@sa-vm:/var/log/apache2# w
14:28:18 up 111 days, 8:42, 1 user, load average: 208.31, 203.42, 138.01
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
billcole pts/0 67.149.19.2 14:02 4.00s 7.525 0.22s sshd: billcole [priv]](https://cdn.toad.social/media_attachments/files/115/225/807/536/287/221/original/bfc3701df0c614e2.png)
@grumpybozo@toad.social2025-09-18 14:38:14
@grumpybozo@toad.social2025-09-12 19:33:36
As a consequence of The Mothership changing its logo, ASF #SpamAssassin is also doing so, with a contest open to all.
We have not yet put together the details for this, but the last time we did this (before I even *used* SA) was 2004 and we did it like this then:
@grumpybozo@toad.social2025-09-18 13:25:07
How the open web closes, FOSS edition...
We are running a contest to create a new logo for ASF #SpamAssassin, but because of the steps taken to consolidate wikis for #TheASF and protect the ASF Confluence instance from various malefactors we have yet to figure out how to allow submissions from pe…
@grumpybozo@toad.social2025-09-09 23:50:20
DAMNIT
Something is abusing the #SpamAssassin RuleQA system again. I assume it's AI only because it hits URLs that seem like they could exist but do not. Generated URLs structured like real "detail" pages that have bogus dates, bogus rule names, or a valid date and valid rule name, but the rule didn't exist at that time.
Pounding it so hard that I can't get i…
@grumpybozo@toad.social2025-09-08 16:24:55
WARNING: #SpamAssassin will take pathologically long times to check pathological message content. <sigh>
There are 2 views on this. One is that it is best to train/test with such 'spicy ham' messages because that makes SA less likely to mark them as spam. My view is that sysadmins handle such pathological mail in such tiny volumes that teaching SA to treat it nicely is a wa…
@grumpybozo@toad.social2025-09-09 19:06:03
#PSA: BEFORE selecting a domain name which you want to use for email, you definitely should consult the #SpamAssassin list of "suspicious" gTLDs. Those are gTLDs which have been so badly run that the overwhelming majority (99% in most cases) of messages using them for email addresses or even in …
@grumpybozo@toad.social2025-10-08 20:49:53
LOL.
Until last week, the scraperbots were poisoning models with the arcane performance details and masscheck logs of the ASF #SpamAssassin project. 2 decades of data that requires a deep knowledge of SA to make any sense of. It's freely available as a matter of principle. Between thousands of days & hundreds of rules with about a dozen distinct corpora, we poisoned the models wi…
@grumpybozo@toad.social2025-09-06 00:36:35
Hrm… it turns out that the just-released #SpamAssassin 4.0.2’s more aggressive CNAME chasing is causing some people problems with slowness, apparently related to slow DNS and/or specific pathological names.
I didn’t see any issues myself despite having run “trunk” for months. I am tempted to blame reporters’ crappy DNS, but maybe I misunderstand. In any case, if you see trouble you may w…