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

Chapter 8. Using SpamAssassin

Once SpamAssassin is installed, the next step is to configure your email system to use it. There are a number of ways to do this, often several for each Mail Transport Agent (MTA). Procmail can be used to invoke SpamAssassin on a site-wide basis, and it can also be used for configuring specific users to use SpamAssassin. An alternative approach that will increase performance is to integrate SpamAssassin more tightly into the MTA. The method used depends on the requirements of the site:

  • If performance is an issue due to the volume of emails handled by the site, inadequacy of hardware resources, or use of the email server for other tasks, then integrating SpamAssassin into the MTA will provide the best performance.

  • If email usage is low (the number of emails received per day is in the low thousands, with few email peaks) and there are no performance concerns, Procmail is a flexible and simple option.

  • If only certain accounts need to be filtered, Procmail is simple...