Spam Assassin

Many of the e-mail clients have special filters designed to block Spam. One among the best Spam filtering software is Spam Assassin, which is an Apache Software Foundation project and is released under the Apache License. The Apache Software Foundation provides organizational, legal, and financial support for a broad range of open source software projects. Spam Assassin is a mature, widely-deployed open source project that serves as a mail filter to identify Spam. It is an intelligent email filter which uses a diverse range of tests to identify unsolicited bulk email, more commonly known as Spam. These tests are applied to email headers and content to classify email using advanced statistical methods. In addition, Spam Assassin has a modular architecture that allows other technologies to be quickly wielded against Spam and is designed for easy integration into virtually any email system.

Spam Assassin is a mail filter installed on our mail servers to identify Spam. It checks for Spam using a large number of pre-set rules that check the header, body, and sender of all email messages sent to your domain mailbox. When an email fails enough of these rules, it will be flagged as potential Spam and sent on to our inbox as an email attachment. We will usually be able to determine if the email is junk or not by reading the Spam Assassin information included with the original email - all without having to open the attachment. Spam Assassin uses a variety of mechanisms including header and text analysis, Bayesian filtering, DNS blacklists, and collaborative filtering databases. Spam Assassin runs on a server, and filters Spam before it reaches our mailbox.

Spam Assassin is a nice program designed for ISP mail servers that immediately rejects incoming Spam before it ever gets anywhere near our inbox. Spam Assassin is written in perl. It requires a recent version of Perl to be installed on the local machine. It depends on many modules and Perl packages, and may be effected if Perl is upgraded on the machine. We may not be able to use it if we do not have rights to install Perl. If we don't have rights to install Perl on the target machine, we can't use Spam Assassin.