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Sunday, July 20, 2008

SpamAssassin for Basic Hosting

The mail filtering interface allows you to configure SpamAssassin user preferences. When used effectively, SpamAssassin can be a powerful filter for combatting the problem of unwanted and unsolicited e-mail. Using the interface, you can change the operational mode (or spam threshold) of SpamAssassin, manage white lists and black lists, and configure logging.

Filtering Modes

The mail filtering engine can operate in four primary modes.

In 'strict' mode, only e-mail messages that originate from domain names or e-mail addresses found in your 'white list' will be delivered to your mailbox; all other messages will be filtered.
In 'permissive' mode, only e-mail messages that originate from domain names or e-mail addresses explicitly listed in your 'black list' will be filtered; all other messages will be delivered to your mailbox. Or in other words, 'permissive' mode is the operational opposite of 'strict' mode.
The third mode, the 'default' mode, essentially separates incoming e-mail messages into three groups: those that are 'white listed' and delivered to your mailbox; those that are 'black listed' and ignored (or saved to a separate mail folder); and a final group which is scored according to a set of spam content rules. If the spam score of an e-mail message in this final group does not exceed a default threshold, then that message is delivered to your mailbox. If the e-mail message exceeds the spam scoring default threshold, it is treated the same as if it were 'black listed', i.e. it is ignored or saved to a separate mail folder (according to your preference).
The 'custom' mode only differs from the 'default' mode in that you can set the threshold to be something other than the default value (the defeault threshold value is 5).

Whitelists & Blacklists

The mail filtering engine allows you to define a 'white list', which is a list of domain names and/or e-mail addresses from which you will explicitly accept incoming e-mail messages. Likewise, you can define a 'black list' of domain names and/or e-mail addresses from which you categorically refuse to accept e-mail messages.

There are two types of white list and black list defintions: 'from' definitions (black and white); and 'to' definitions (black and white). The 'whitelist_from' directive is used to specify addresses from which you will accept mail irregardless of message content. The 'blacklist_from' directive is used to specify addresses from which you wish to filter messages irregardless of message content.

Both the 'whitelist_to' and 'blacklist_to' definitions are matched against the 'To:' and 'Cc:' headers of incoming e-mail messages. If any address listed in these header fields matches the e-mail addresses or domain names found in 'whitelist_to' definitions, then the incoming e-mail message will be 'whitelisted' (i.e. it will be delivered to your e-mail inbox). If a match is made against any of the domain names and/or addresses defined by 'blacklist_to' directives, then the incoming e-mail message will be 'blacklisted' (i.e it will be filtered).

You can use wildcards (*) with both white list and black list definitions (regular expressions are not supported). Multiple domain name and/or e-mail addresses, separated by spaces, are allowed to be defined as part of a single directive. Multiple occurrences of any directive is also acceptable.

Consider the following examples of whitelist_from, whitelist_to, blacklist_from, and blacklist_to definitions:

   whitelist_from     *@some-domain.name
   whitelist_from     friend@some.isp neighbor@another.isp
   whitelist_to       mailing_list@add.ress
   blacklist_from     known@spam.mer
   blacklist_from     *.spam-haven.net

Logging

Logging can be useful for reviewing the results of e-mail filtering. Log files however, can become quite large over time, using up valuable disk space.

More Information

Information about the SpamAssassin filtering engine can be found at:

http://spamassassin.apache.org/

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