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 Other Rulesets


Many other rulesets exist and are published on the Internet. These are often themed, for example, detecting invalid HTML, common URLs used in spam, or catching sequences of characters often used in spam emails. Custom rulesets are often updated frequently in response to changes in spam being sent.

An Internet search for 'spamassassin rulesets' will return many pages linking to rulesets. The SpamAssassin wiki (a collaborative information website) includes links to many custom rulesets on http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/CustomRulesets.

Custom rulesets may have specific installation instructions that should be read and followed. In general, the installation involves copying a rule file and a score file into /etc/mail/spamassasin/ and restarting spamd.

The more rules SpamAssassin uses, the more the resources used to process each email. System performance may degrade if too many custom rulesets are used. Performance issues are covered in Chapter 14.