Welcome to SpamAssassin! ------------------------ SpamAssassin is a mail filter which attempts to identify spam using text analysis and several internet-based realtime blacklists. Using its rule base, it uses a wide range of heuristic tests on mail headers and body text to identify "spam", also known as unsolicited commercial email. Once identified, the mail can then be optionally tagged as spam for later filtering using the user's own mail user-agent application. In its most recent test, SpamAssassin differentiated between spam and non-spam mail correctly in 99.94% of cases. Since then, it's just been getting better and better! SpamAssassin also includes support for reporting spam messages automatically, and/or manually, to collaborative filtering databases such as Vipul's Razor [1]. [1]: http://razor.sourceforge.net/ The distribution provides "spamassassin", a command line tool to perform filtering, along with "Mail::SpamAssassin", a set of perl modules which implement a Mail::Audit plugin, allowing SpamAssassin to be used in a Mail::Audit filter, spam-protection proxy SMTP or POP/IMAP server, or a variety of different spam-blocking scenarios. In addition, Craig Hughes has contributed "spamd", a daemonized version of SpamAssassin, which runs persistently. Using "spamc", a lightweight C client, this allows an MTA to process large volumes of mail through SpamAssassin without having to fork/exec a perl interpreter for each one. Ian R. Justman has contributed "spamproxy", a spam-filtering SMTP proxy server. This lives in the "spamproxy" directory. SpamAssassin lives at http://spamassassin.org/ or in CPAN, and is distributed under the same license as Perl itself. Use of the SpamAssassin name is restricted as documented in the file named "Trademark". This module owes a lot of inspiration to Mark Jeftovic's filter.plx, which I used for a long time, and contributed some code to. However, SpamAssassin is a ground-up rewrite with a new, greatly improved ruleset, a different code model and installation system, and hopefully will be easy to adapt for a multitude of applications. [2]: http://AntiSpam.shmOOze.net/filter/ Questions regarding SpamAssassin should be sent to the mailing list: . Installing SpamAssassin ----------------------- See the INSTALL file. Locali[sz]ation --------------- All text displayed to users is taken from the configuration files. This means that you can translate messages, test descriptions, and templates into other languages. If you do so, I would *really* appreciate if you could send a copy back of the updated messages; mail them to . Hopefully if it takes off, I can add them to the distribution as "official" translations and build in support for this. You will, of course, get credited for this work ;) Help With SpamAssassin ---------------------- There's a mailing list for support or discussion of SpamAssassin. It lives at . See http://spamassassin.org/lists.html for the sign-up address and a link to the archive of past messages. Commercial Tests ---------------- There are several tests in the spamassassin configuration file which are turned off by default, namely the mail-abuse.org and bl.spamcop.net tests. The mail-abuse.org tests are RCVD_IN_RBL, RCVD_IN_RSS, and RCVD_IN_DUL; the bl.spamcop.net test is called RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET. These are commercial services, so you need to pay money to use them. Having said that, the bl.spamcop.net service gets my recommendation as the most useful blacklisting DNS service I've found. More information on it can be found at http://spamcop.net/bl.shtml . The mail-abuse.org tests are free for personal use, for now -- so if you're using SpamAssassin as a personal mail filter you may turn them on. More information on the mail-abuse.org services can be found here: http://mail-abuse.org/rbl+/ and http://www.mail-abuse.org/feestructure.html . To turn on the tests, simply assign them a non-zero score, e.g. by adding these lines to your ~/.spamassassin.cf file: score RCVD_IN_RBL 10 score RCVD_IN_RSS 1 score RCVD_IN_DUL 1 score RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET 4 Automatic Whitelist System -------------------------- SpamAssassin includes automatic whitelisting; The current iteration is considerably more complex than the original version. The way it works is by tracking for each sender address the average score of messages so far seen from there. Then, it combines this long-term average score for the sender with the score for the particular message being evaluated, after all other rules have been applied. This functionality is off by default, and is enabled with the "-a" flag to either spamassassin or spamd. A system-wide auto-whitelist can be used, by setting the auto_whitelist_path and auto_whitelist_file_mode configuration commands appropriately, e.g. auto_whitelist_path /var/spool/spamassassin/auto-whitelist auto_whitelist_file_mode 0666 The spamassassin -W and -R command line flags provide an API to add and remove entries 'manually', if you so desire. They operate based on an input mail message, to allow them to be set up as aliases which users can simply forward their mails to. See the spamassassin manual page for more details. The default address-list implementation, Mail::SpamAssassin::DBBasedAddrList, uses Berkeley DB files to store the addresses. There may be synchronization issues with this implementation in an NFS environment. Reasonable attempts have been made to ensure proper locking of the DB file, but it may yet be somewhat flakey. (end of README) // vim:tw=74: