Attention Panixians: spam filtering

I've been running Spam Assassin on my Panix account for years. Sometime in the last week or two, the software has started rejecting as spam a lot of things it had been letting through, and that I want to receive.

For the moment, I'm dealing with this by increasing the number of "hits required" to count something as spam, and whitelisting a couple of dozen senders and domains. Some of those are in fact mailing lists, but lists I want to be on, ranging from ACLU People Power to the MBTA alert system.

I have also put "root@panix.com" into my whitelist; it feels vaguely like I shouldn't need to do that, but I assume Spam Assassin isn't customized per ISP. (I have a cron job that sends me nightly emails, and those are marked as being from root, rather than from myself.)

Activism: state level

I just emailed my state assemblywoman about a social media privacy bill (at the request of the ACLU), and got an autoreply, which started with

I've never before resorted to sending an automatic response to emails. But this legislative session has been like no other. The volume of emails, letters, and phone calls I've received about pending legislation, bill co-sponsorship, and other matters has been unprecendeted. [sic]

The email says they do read every email, and that she will try to respond promptly, but if it's urgent, please telephone.

(I've been getting automatic "thanks for contacting my office" emails from Congress for a while.)