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

Testing and Troubleshooting


To test if SpamAssassin is working properly, send an email to a user who is configured to receive spam-filtered email. Once the email has been received, examine the headers. There should be lines similar to the following:

X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.00 (2004-07-20) on mta.domain.com
X-Spam-Level:
X-Spam-Status: No, hits=0.9 required=4.0 tests=BAYES_00,DATE_IN_PAST_96_XX,
NO_REAL_NAME,RCVD_IN_SORBS autolearn=no version=2.63

If headers like these are present, then SpamAssassin has run correctly. If the email is not received or the extra headers are not present, then SpamAssassin has failed to work.

Several tests can be performed to analyze the problem. Some were covered in Chapter 6 in Verifying the Installation. The following sections also discuss SpamAssassin troubleshooting.

Check the MTA

If the mail has not been delivered at all, confirm that the MTA is running. The ps -ef command should be used for this. Piping the results through the grep utility will...