I did a very informal comparison of dspam to Spam Assassin, and found them to be about the same.
They are so dramatically different, I can't believe you even would suggest they're "about the same". SpamAssassin is written in Perl, and is significantly slower than dspam. SpamAssassin also relies on static rulesets, not the "quality" of the mail received. You can't do per-user filtering with SA. With dspam, if one user prefers seeing lots of HTML advertisements, they can. Another user on the same system can reject those as spam. In my case, I was using SpamAssassin for about 2 years, trained down to a threshhold of 2, with 13 RBLs in place, and my users were still getting 20-30 spams per-week. SpamAssassin's accuracy under that configuration after 2 years was about 90%. In 1 month of using dspam, we were over 98% accuracy, AND I no longer had to manage mail. The users get their own quarantine and they can manage their own mail "quality" themselves, I don't _ever_ have to get involved.
They have some different features, but basically both "learn" based on your mail patterns. dspam takes a little longer to get trained, and is tuned to have a very low portion of false positives (that is, it very seldom flags non-spam as spam).
You probably didn't read the docs. Did you load it with the SA corpus first? Did you train it with that corpus? It took about an hour for me to train it to a level where it was accurately catching and quarantining mail. Getting dspam configured properly is no small task, and you have to be _very_ careful about using conflicting algorithms when you configure and build it. Also, were you using TOE? TEFT? TUM? Each of these has VERY different usages and specific conditions where they work well, or horrible.
With any spam filter, though, it's important to periodically check the logs or spam folders, to see what messages were misidentified as spam.
And with dspam, this is all handled completely seamlessly, no need to "check logs" or "spam folders" at all. Users simply forward their false positives to spam-$USER@domain.com, and it gets marked as spam. When more emails come in that match similar tokens, those are marked as spam also.
I'm still looking for a volunteer to manage the mailing lists, by the way. It takes just a few minutes per day (every day).
I host quite a few mailing lists here for SourceFubar.Net, and I'd be happy to take over management of the lists for you, if you wish. We don't have any spam on the lists we host, and everything works as it should. David A. Desrosiers desrod@gnu-designs.com http://gnu-designs.com