Here are the headers of something marked as spam, that shouldn't have been (certainly garbage, but I didn't uncheck the marketing email stuff at the time). They turn off rules that fire on # misformatted messages generated by common mail apps in contravention of the # email RFCs. # score HTML_COMMENT_8BITSĐ # score UPPERCASE_25_50 0 # score UPPERCASE_50_75 0 # score UPPERCASE_75_100Đ # score OBSCURED_EMAIL 0 # Speakers of any language that uses non-English, accented characters may wish # to uncomment the following lines. They will switch off some # rules that detect 8-bit characters, which commonly trigger on mails using CJK # character sets, or that assume a western-style charset is in use. # score SYMBOLIC_TEST_NAME n.nn # Speakers of Asian languages, like Chinese, Japanese and Korean, will almost # definitely want to uncomment the following lines. To see the list of tests and their default scores, go to #. The default scores are # read from the installed spamassassin rules files, but you can override them # here. # Add your own customised scores for some tests below. # required_score 5 add_header spam Flag _YESNOCAPS_ add_header all Status _YESNO_, score=_SCORE_ required=_REQD_ tests=_TESTS_ autolearn=_AUTOLEARN_ version=_VERSION_ add_header all Level _STARS(*)_ add_header all Checker-Version SpamAssassin _VERSION_ (_SUBVERSION_) on _HOSTNAME_ ok_locales en # Welcomelist and blocklist addresses are now file-glob-style patterns, so # or "*." will all work. # How many points before a mail is considered spam. If you want to make changes to the site-wide defaults, #* create a file in /etc/spamassassin or /etc/mail/spamassassin instead. At runtime, if a user has no preferences in their home directory #* already, it will be copied for them, allowing them to perform personalised #* customisation. #* #* Note: this file is not read by SpamAssassin until copied into the user #* directory. See 'perldoc Mail::SpamAssassin::Conf' # for details of what can be tweaked. You can't even debug what it's doing without the headers. If it's ignoring the configuration, you can't do that. From my experience, spamassassin was too aggressive if you didn't set the required_score. There are no spamassassin headers in my email. It also appears that it's completely ignoring my configuration. It does appear that it may be recording learning information. I looked at the headers, no flags from spam assassin. It even has marked emails in my google contacts as spam, for which I said not to do. I checked the documentation I don't see anything, I guess it says “predefined rules”. I used to be a Web Hosting server admin, that's why I chose SA, because I've used it before. On the bright side, I cleaned my up my email as a result. My dumb fault for applying it to every folder, but, even my inbox was disastrous. So I installed evolution and spamassassin and ticked some box's, and spamassassin proceeded to mark everything in my gmail as spam.