Book Image

Linux Email

Book Image

Linux Email

Overview of this book

Many businesses want to run their email servers on Linux for greater control and flexibility of corporate communications, but getting started can be complicated. The attractiveness of a free-to-use and robust email service running on Linux can be undermined by the apparent technical challenges involved. Some of the complexity arises from the fact that an email server consists of several components that must be installed and configured separately, then integrated together. This book gives you just what you need to know to set up and maintain an email server. Unlike other approaches that deal with one component at a time, this book delivers a step-by-step approach across all the server components, leaving you with a complete working email server for your small business network. Starting with a discussion on why you should even consider hosting your own email server, the book covers setting up the mail server. We then move on to look at providing web access, so that users can access their email out of the office. After this we look at the features you'll want to add to improve email productivity: virus protection, spam detection, and automatic email processing. Finally we look at an essential maintenance task: backups. Written by professional Linux administrators, the book is aimed at technically confident users and new and part-time system administrators. The emphasis is on simple, practical and reliable guidance. Based entirely on free, Open Source software, this book will show you how to set up and manage your email server easily.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Linux E-mail
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface

Customizing SpamAssassin


SpamAssassin is very configurable. Almost every setting can be configured on a system-wide or user-specific basis.

Reasons to customize

If SpamAssassin is so good, then why configure it? Well, there are several reasons why it's worth improving spam filtering with SpamAssassin.

  • SpamAssassin by default (that is, when installed but not customized) typically manages to detect over 80% of spam. After adding a few customizations, the detection rate can be greater than 95%.

  • Everyone's spam is different and one user's spam might look like another user's ham. By trying to be general, SpamAssassin may fail to filter spam for every user.

  • Some of the features of SpamAssassin are disabled by default. By enabling them, the spam recognition rate is increased.

The following configuration options are discussed in this chapter:

  • Altering the scores for rules: This allows rules to be disabled, poor rules to be given less weight, and better rules to be given a higher weight.

  • Obtaining...