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

SpamAssassin and Procmail


Procmail is a Mail Delivery Agent (MDA), sometimes called a Local Delivery Agent (LDA). It is not a Mail Transport Agent (MTA) such as sendmail, Postfix, Exim, or qmail. Procmail relies on another application (normally the MTA) to run it and to pass each email message. Procmail can run other programs (generally called email filters), make decisions, and take specific actions depending on the content of the email it is processing. Procmail may also be invoked from .forward files, which are part of the sendmail local delivery system.

Testing for Procmail

First, check if Procmail is installed. The following command will locate Procmail if it is installed in the system path:

$ which procmail

If the response indicates that Procmail cannot be found, it will have to be obtained and installed.

which: no procmail in (/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/bin)

If the response lists an absolute path, then Procmail is installed:

/usr/bin/procmail

Obtaining and Installing Procmail

Procmail...