Anti-spam

The anti-spam portion of Warden is powered by Spamassassin®. Spamassassin is the #1 Open Source anti-spam platform giving system administrators a filter to classify email and block spam.

It uses a robust scoring framework and plug-ins to integrate a wide range of advanced heuristic and statistical analysis tests on email headers and body text including text analysis, Bayesian filtering, DNS blocklists, and collaborative filtering databases.

Features

  • Wide-spectrum: SpamAssassin uses a wide variety of local and network tests to identify spam signatures. This makes it harder for spammers to identify one aspect which they can craft their messages to work around.
  • Easy to extend: Anti-spam tests and configuration are stored in plain text, making it easy to configure and add new rules.
  • Flexible: SpamAssassin encapsulates its logic in a well-designed, abstract API so it can be integrated anywhere in the email stream.
  • Easy Configuration: SpamAssassin requires very little configuration; you do not need to continually update it with details of your mail accounts, mailing list memberships, etc. Once classified, site and user-specific policies can then be applied against spam. Policies can be applied on both mail servers and later using the user's own mail user-agent application.

SPAM vs HAM

SPAM - Spam, also known as junk email, is a type of electronic spam where unsolicited messages are sent by email.
HAM - Ham is e-mail that is not Spam. In other words, "non-spam", or "good mail". It should be considered a shorter, snappier synonym for "non-spam".

Restarting Spamassassin

The SpamAssassin daemon should never be started because it is never used with Amavis. It would be a waste of resources to have it running. Warden will try to disable the spamassassin daemon on installation.

Updating Rules

You can manually run the sa-update command to update your SpamAssassin rules. 

/usr/bin/sa-update

Rules are stored in the directory /var/lib/spamassassin.

Rules QA

You can view statistics about all the SpamAssassin rules online at https://ruleqa.spamassassin.org/

Related Files

File Description
/etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf Configuration file for spamassassin
/etc/sysconfig/spamassassin Options passed to the spamassassin daemon

Related Pages