I recently setup a local installation of spam assassin for testing promotions as we want to catch any spam false positives before we mail our customers (This email is opt-in). We even added several (~30) additional rulesets that auto-update daily with a cron because we would rather be much stricter than average.
Here is my problem: Our SA install consistently ranks things much lower than other spam test we send mails to, even passing mail that our email provider marked as spam (that was embarrassing). It seems as if even the default rules are not working! We do recieve a score, and the worst spam I could find in my spam folder is marked as spam, but on average the score
for real spam is only 2-4 (5 is the threshold).
I'm looking for advice from veteran SA users, more diagnostics I can run, and/or recommended rule sets. If this should be split into multiple questions I will happily do so.
System info: Freebsd 7.2 SpamAssassin Server version 3.2.5 running on Perl 5.8.9 Fresh SA install on a fresh OS install.
EDIT I verified that our basic rules are working, I'm looking mainly for things that will help me be stricter on mass marketing emails.
Thanks for any help, Chance