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

Summary


This chapter discussed the building blocks of SpamAssassin—rules. SpamAssassin allows the user to define rules to respond to the spam a site is currently receiving. There are a variety of rule types for processing different parts of the email.

User-defined rules are based on Perl regular expressions. Rule scoring is an important part of SpamAssassin filtering techniques.

Using a corpus and calculating the effectiveness of rules can assist in re-scoring rules to improve filtering. Several custom rulesets can be added to a site, and these should be frequently updated.