SpamAssassin

Description:

The annoyance factor for individual users whose email is crammed with pitches for pornography, absurd moneymaking schemes, and dubious health products is fierce. But for organizations, the cost of spam in lost productivity and burned bandwidth is astronomical. While society is grappling with a solution to the burgeoning crisis of spam proliferation, the pressure is on system administrators to find a solution to this massive problem in-house. And fast.

Sys admins can field scores of complaints and spend months testing software suites that turn out to be too aggressive, too passive, or too complicated to setup only to discover that SpamAssassin (SA), the leading open source spam-fighting tool, is free, flexible, powerful, highly-regarded, and remarkably effective. The drawback? SpamAssassin's lack of published documentation.

SpamAssassin by Alan Schwartz, is the only published resource devoted to SpamAssassin and how to integrate it effectively into your networks. This clear, concise guide clarifies the installation, configuration, and use of the SpamAssassin spam-checking system (versions 2.63 and 3.0) for Unix system administrators using the Postfix, Sendmail, Exim, or qmail mail servers, helping administrators make the right integration decision for their particular environments.

It covers concrete advice on how to:

• Customize SpamAssassin's rules, and even create new ones Train SpamAssassin's Bayesian classifier, a statistical engine for detecting spam, to optimize it for the sort of email that you typically receive
  
• Block specific addresses, hosts, and domains using third-party blacklists like the one maintained by Spamcop.net.
  
• Whitelist known good sources of email, so that messages from clients, coworkers, and friends aren't inadvertently lost.
  
• Configure SpamAssassin to work with newer spam-filtering methods such as Hashcash (www.hashcash.org) and Sender Policy Framework (SPF).

Sys admins, network administrators, and ISPs pay for spam with hours of experimentation and tedious junk email management, frayed user tempers, and their sanity. SpamAssassin, together with this essential book, give you the tools you need to take back your organization's inboxes.

"Detailed, accurate and informative--recommended for spam-filtering beginners and experts alike." --Justin Mason, SpamAssassin development team

 

Table of Contents:

Preface

1. Introducing SpamAssassin

     How SpamAssassin Works

     Organization of SpamAssassin

     Mailers and SpamAssassin

     The Politics of Scanning

2. SpamAssassin Basics

     Prerequisites

     Building SpamAssassin

     Invoking SpamAssassin with procmail

     Using spamc/spamd

     Invoking SpamAssassin in a Perl Script

     SpamAssassin and the End User

3. SpamAssassin Rules

     The Anatomy of a Test

     Modifying the Score of a Test

     Writing Your Own Tests

     The Built-in Tests

     Whitelists and Blacklists

4. SpamAssassin as a Learning System

     Autowhitelisting

     Bayesian Filtering

5. Integrating SpamAssassin with sendmail

     Spam-Checking at Delivery

     Spam-Checking During SMTP

     Building a Spam-Checking Gateway

6. Integrating SpamAssassin with Postfix

     Postfix Architecture

     Spam-Checking During Local Delivery

     Spam-Checking All Incoming Mail

     Building a Spam-Checking G ateway

7. Integrating SpamAssassin with qmail

     qmail Architecture

     Spam-Checking During Local Delivery

     Spam-Checking All Incoming Mail

     Building a Spam-Checking Gateway

8. Integrating SpamAssassin with Exim

     Spam-Checking via procmail

     Spam-Checking All Incoming Mail

     Using Routers and Transports

     Using exiscan

     Using sa-exim

     Building a Spam-Checking Gateway

9. Using SpamAssassin as a Proxy

     Using Pop3proxy

     Using SAproxy Pro

Appendix

Index