Richey,
the new approach to spam catching is definitly tied to the Friends system.. At first we too had people complain that the "old" way was more familiar and understood, but after a while they would agree that the newer spam catching approach is much better. The Friends system of scoring is different and more in depth than using the older "Spam" settings. Consider disabling the old spam approach.
One thing that makes Friends better is identifying legitmate senders. So, set this outgoing address option as the administrator for the system ( in the Spam Control section for Friends)
To automatically add addresses you can check:
Add all outgoing email addresses to list.
After a few weeks "good email" from people they correspond with will almost never appear marked as spam, and they are happier.
In the new Friends system, the best default to set is (in our shop, anyway)
Although these two lines are a shameful interface design, click the Apply whilelist... button AND set a score in the next line, but do not click the radio button of that next line. Start with 3 or 4, the new system is really that good.
There are many other settings in the Spam Control admin section you might want to review. I suggest
Enable ASpam (true) content based message scoring mechanism
SURBL Spam URI Realtime Blocklists (enter list)
Realtime Blackhole Lists (RBL's), action=deny,accept,stamp (enter list)
use and Share RBL reputation data with central NetWin (check)
And note that if someone has set Friends values or Spam values in their own account, they may remain in place even if you change the domain defaults, so there may be some support work to move individual accounts to the new Friends settings and remove the older spam settings (but there is a button to "Delete [all user] Settings").
If your accounts use Surgeweb, tell them the personal "Spam" "not Spam" buttons do work well with Friends. And if the from address is different than the reply-to address in incoming messages the user will see the reply-to address in red and a link to mark it as valid for future scoring.
So all these words to justify my answer to your question "What old Spam settings to use?" , never/never/never.
Good luck in the transition.
Larry
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--- Original message ---
Subject: [SurgeMail List] Anti-spam seems to have gone haywire.
From: Richey <HIDDEN@s@battleop.com>
To: <surgemail-list@netwinsite.com>
Date: Tuesday, 04/10/2012 8:01 AM
For years Surge’s anti-spam has worked with almost no complaints from any users. We rarely got false positives and for the most part it was pretty rare that spam made it through. In the last month I upgraded to the latest version of Surgemail and it’s now become a hassle of making adjustments to the spam system. Most of my customers are somewhat lazy when it comes to technology so they really don’t like the friends system. Could some of you tell me what scores you have setup in your spam controls? Also is there a way to translate the modified headers on a tagged email so that they are a little easier to understand why an email was tagged as spam?
Richey
