SpamAssassin Is Losing The Battle For My Inbox

It seems more and more spam is getting past SpamAssassin and into my inbox these days.  The upgrade to 3.0 hasn’t helped and may have even made it worse (or maybe the spam just got worse in the few days I took to get the database upgraded correctly etc).  I’ve got the required score set down to 3 but there’s a bunch of spam coming through with a score of 2 while I do get random emails from people that score up to 2.5 and shouldn’t be considered spam.

The most obvious thing I notice about the spam that’s getting through is it usually starts off with "Congratulations!" or "Final Notice!", basically the first sentence seems to be starting with an exclamation mark.  There are two other trends, there’s a lot of spam about PayPal apparently charging my credit card (which of course is fake) which all comes from the same address so procmail can take care of them (actually spamassassin can blacklist addresses too).  There’s also a bunch of spam with background colors set on the body.  I’ll have to look into creating a new spam assassin rule to pick up on that.