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

Using CPAN


With some Open Source software, installing from source historically involved time-consuming modifications to the make files and configuration files along with some knowledge of the process of compiling.

SpamAssassin is written in the Perl language. There are various ways of packaging Perl that make it easy to install. Unless the system configuration is unusual, installing SpamAssassin is relatively uncomplicated. To install SpamAssassin, enter the CPAN shell by typing:

# perl -MCPAN -e shell

If the CPAN module is correctly configured, the following output (or something similar) will appear:

cpan shell -- CPAN exploration and modules installation (v1.7601)
ReadLine support enabled

Now, at the cpan prompt, enter the following command:

cpan> install Mail::SpamAssassin

The CPAN module will query an online database to find the latest version of SpamAssassin and its dependencies, and then install them. Dependencies will be installed before SpamAssassin.

The sample output is shown below...