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

Rule Files


Standard rule files are placed in /usr/share/spamassassin/. There is a variety of files in this directory, and the files may change with different releases of SpamAssassin. Barring a few exceptions, names for rules files are generally of the form: nn_description.cf where nn is a number, for example 10 or 25, and description describes the type of rules, for example dnsbl_tests or bayes.

The rules installed by SpamAssassin are version-specific. Custom rules can be defined in files ending in .cf, and placed in the /etc/mail/spamassassin/ directory, or in ~/.spamassassin/user_prefs for user-specific rules.

Rules

SpamAssassin first reads all the files in /usr/share/spamassassin/ in alphanumerical order; 10_misc.cf will be read before 23_bayes.cf. SpamAssassin then reads all the .cf files in /etc/mail/spamassassin/, again in alphanumeric order. Finally, SpamAssassin reads ~user/.spamassassin/user_prefs. If a rule or score is defined in two files, then the setting in the last file read...