Spam filter changes in past week -- lots of false positives

db122

I've noticed that in the past week, I've been getting a huge number of false positives for spam detection in mail. More than 75% of my inbound email is being flagged as spam. Before last week, it was one or two emails a day, usually non-critical stuff. Now it's bank statements from my credit union, 2 factor authentication emails, pretty much everything is fair game. Example spam headers from my bank for a statement notification used to be:

X-Spamd-Bar: +++++
X-Spam-Status: No, score=5.79
X-Spam-Level: *****

but now are:

X-Spam-Level: **********
X-Spam-Status: Yes, score=10.84
X-Spamd-Bar: ++++++++++
X-Spam: Yes

I don't think anything has changed on my end. I've been flagging them as not junk in the webmail app. Any idea if something has changed? Trying to avoid forwarding spam to my gmail, but with so much marked as spam I'm disabling that procmail filter.

Thanks for any advice!

sean

We fixed some spam training issues last week, it might have worked too well.

Webmail isn't attached to the spam training system so flagging the messages won't fix the training.

Feel free to collect all of the good messages into a mail folder then email our support team to let us know the location. We'll feed those into the training system to reduce the false positives.

alexpg

Hi, I've got the same experience. Maybe even worse. Almost everything goes to spam, even the OpalStack Forum Signup Confirmation email went to spam. Like db122 it's almost everything regardless of how solid the email content or sender. I use Gmail as the reader if that matters.

sean

alexpg is your issue the same as the OPs, ie do you have X-Spam-Status: Yes in your message headers?

db122

alexpg It's unclear from your reply whether your emails are being flagged by Opalstack as Spam or by Gmail. My original post refers to the former situation.

However, if it's the latter where Gmail is flagging forwarded emails as spam, I've found that using procmail to redirect to Gmail gives me more control and reduced false-positive spam in Gmail vs the one-click forwarding provided by Opalstack admin interface. You can set up a procmail script for each mail user in the admin interface. Here is a stripped-down version of my script (adjust your forwarding address):

SENDER=`formail -c -x Return-Path`
SENDMAILFLAGS="-oi -f $SENDER"
FORWARD=<yourgmail>@gmail.com

:0:
* ^x-spam-level: \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*
.Junk/

:0
! $FORWARD

The script will send messages that Opalstack servers think is spam to the local mailbox and forward other messages to Gmail. I also use this to whitelist addresses too by adding rules before the junk stanza. Periodically I use the Opalstack Webmail to look for collected spam messages that might actually be ham, and I adjust the requisite spam level by adjusting the Junk regex in the script, adding or removing asterisk patterns (\*).

Good luck!

aa11

I know I've brought this up before but the Opalstack "Your ‪Opalstack LLC‬ subscription will renew soon" emails from Stripe are still being marked as spam and are receiving an even higher score than before.

December 12, 2020:

X-Spam-Level: ***
X-Spamd-Bar: +++
X-Spam-Status: No, score=3.60

January 12, 2021:

X-Spam-Level: ********
X-Spamd-Bar: ++++++++
X-Spam: Yes

I'm not 100% sure if it was delivered to my Inbox (and not Junk on the server) and then my local mail client moved it to Junk, or if it was moved to Junk by the server. But in any case those headers aren't helping anyone ;-)

I continue to collect false positives and will open a ticket when I have a lot.

Reference:
https://community.opalstack.com/d/265-spam-training-for-emails/11
https://community.opalstack.com/d/265-spam-training-for-emails/12

tom

Same problem here with around 6 mailboxes.
Collecting false positives for training is a good suggestion
WHITE LISTING OPTION would really be a burner!
Thanks for keeping this issue under development.
Regards, Tom