SpamAssassin
Your private server supports SpamAssasin, a free, open-source email filter distributed under the terms of the
Apache Software license.
SpamAssassin applies a number of tests to an incoming message, and each test returns a score. If enough tests
return a combined score that is high enough. The default setting is five (5). Once a message has been tagged,
there are a number of possible actions that can be taken with the message. Both tagging and actions can be
handled either as a system-wide or as a user specific filter.
- System-wide Filters apply SpamAssassin tests to every email message that arrives on your private server,
regardless of the intended recipient. This avoids accidentally losing the occasional legitimate message that
has spam-like characteristics.
- User Specific Filters enables individual users to use different methods of dealing with spam. The user-specific
settings enable you to configure specific users with different ways of dealing with messages tagged as spam. Once
you tag a message, SpamAssassin will do one of the following with the message, depending on your system and user
settings.
- Deliver Tagged messages along with Untagged messages enables the user to see if a message is tagged as spam
and enables them to make the final decision to read the message or not. If you have system-wide filtering on,
it is a good idea to use this option for the system-level filtering.
- Deliver Spam to a special mailbox delivers untagged messages and delivers tagged messages to a special
mailbox (or IMAP folder). This is a good user-level setting for all users who don't want potential spam
cluttering the user's inbox but want to have the option to check through to see if there is anything important
among the tagged messages.
- Deliver spam to a special mailbox and forward non-spam to another address specifies that if a user has another
account that they forward the user's messages to, this enables you to filter out spam before forwarding the
messages to the user's account
- Forward Spam to another address specifies non-spam is delivered normally, but spam can be forwarded to an
account on a different server.
- Delete Spam specifies that all messages tagged as spam are deleted, either on a system level, or just for
specific users. This is not suggested, as messages (and possible false positives) would be permanently thrown away.
- Delete Spam and forward non-spam to another address specifies that the tagged messages are deleted before
forwarding untagged messages to a remote email account.
- You can configure SpamAssassin to keep a log of activity. Logs can be useful in tracking down problems and
errors but, like any other log file, your SpamAssassin logs must be cleared out occasionally to prevent them from
using up all your disk space. You can issue the cron command to archive or empty your spam log files.
- There are a number of sources of documentation for SpamAssassin. You can access the manual pages issuing the
following commands.
% man spamassassin
% man Mail::SpamAssassin::Conf
Additional Information
Locate further information about the SpamAssassin filtering engine at the SpamAssassin Project Web site:
http://spamassassin.apache.org/
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