Book Image

SpamAssassin: A practical guide to integration and configuration

Book Image

SpamAssassin: A practical guide to integration and configuration

Overview of this book

As a busy administrator, you know Spam is a major distraction in todays network. The effects range from inappropriate content arriving in the mailboxes up to contact email addresses placed on a website being deluged with unsolicited mail, causing valid enquiries and sales leads to be lost and wasting employee time. The perception of the problem of spam is as big as the reality. In response to the growing problem of spam, a number of free and commercial applications and services have been developed to help network administrators and email users combat spam. Its up to you to choose and then get the most out of an antispam solution. Free to use, flexible, and effective, SpamAssassin has become the most popular open source antispam application. Its unique combination of power and flexibility make it the right choice. This book will now help you set up and optimize SpamAssassin for your network.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
SpamAssassin
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Introduction
Glossary

Anti-Spam Tools


There are many anti-spam tools available. Some are available for free, and others are commercial products. Most anti-spam tools use more than one of the anti-spam techniques. SpamAssassin is the acknowledged leader of the free anti-spam tools and can perform as well as the commercial solutions.

SpamAssassin

SpamAssassin is a popular anti-spam tool that is now a top level project at the Apache Software Foundation.

How SpamAssassin Works

SpamAssassin is based on rules and uses a score-based system. There are a number of rules; each rule performs a test on the email, and each rule has a score. When an email is processed by SpamAssassin, it is tested against each rule. For each rule found to be 'true' for an email, the score associated with the rule is added to the overall score for that email. Once all the rules have been used, the total score for the email is compared to a threshold value. If the score exceeds the threshold, then the email is marked as spam.

SpamAssassin does...