This is not the
SpamAssassin home page! This page is for our
end-users.
Click
here for the SpamAssassin home page.
Spam Assassin
The system we are
using to tag junk mail is called
SpamAssassin. The system uses a scoring system to
decide if a e-mail should be marked as spam.
Click on the links at the left for instructions on filtering
with your mail client. The majority of our customers
use Outlook Express as a mail program. The
instructions for your mail client tell you how to move spam
to it's own folder or just delete it automatically.
Let us know what you think
Let us
know what you think of this system - we want to know!
Is this useful? Annoying? Catches too much good
e-mail or misses too much spam? Let us know what
you like or dislike and we will see what we can do about it.
Your feedback is very helpful to us.
If you would like to
have your mail exempted from this system
please let
us know. We can easily exempt your mail from
SpamAssassin processing. If you find that valid mail
sent to you is being marked incorrectly we would appreciate
you reporting that to us - it will help us fine tune the
filters.
Privacy and e-mail
security issues
Please note that this
is an automatic system - your e-mail is scanned by machine
and at no point does anyone read your e-mail. The
contents of the e-mail are altered only by the addition of
the spam signature to the subject line and to the headers
that you normally do not see. E-mail is
NOT DELETED by this system and you will not loose mail even
if it is incorrectly marked as spam (unless you configure
YOUR system to automatically delete mail).
How SpamAssassin detects
junk mail...
If you go to the
SpamAssassin web site you will see many references to
'Procmail'
and 'Perl'.
The SpamAssassin web site assumes you are using a
Unix
(rather than Windows) mail system - most of the instructions
on the web site do not apply to you.
The main things that
SpamAssassin looks for are suspicious items in the headers
of e-mail (the processing information for delivering the
mail) and for common things that Spammers put in the e-mail
messages - things like "this is not spam", "complies with
senate bill", etc. A single suspicious item in
an e-mail is usually not enough to get a message
marked as spam - it takes multiple 'hits' to cause mail to
be marked.
Junk mail has many
distinctive 'markers' and SpamAssassin assigns a numeric
value to each of these. If the sum of the values
assigned to the message exceeds a set threshold the e-mail
is marked as spam. Here is an example of how an e-mail
is scored using a sample
spam message. SpamAssassin found the following
things wrong with this e-mail:
* 1.2 -- From: does
not include a real name
1.2 points because there
is not a real name of the person who sent it.
* 1.6 -- From: ends in
numbers
1.6 points since the
person who sent it had an e-mail address ending in numbers
(Health_Center5@healthforyou.com). The rest of the
things wrong with this message include:
* 2.0 -- Character set
doesn't exist
* 2.0 -- Invalid Date:
header (no timezone)
* 0.8 -- Subject has an
exclamation mark
* 2.0 -- BODY:
/mailto:[a-z]+\d{2,}\@/is
* 2.1 -- BODY:
/remove.*subject/i
* 3.9 -- BODY:
/subject.*remove/i
* 2.0 -- BODY:
/mailto:\S+\?subject=[3D=\s"']*remove/is
* 2.0 --
BODY:/\n\n.*mailto:\S+\?subject=/is
* 4.0 -- Character set
indicates a foreign language
* 1.8 -- No MX records
for the From: domain
Add all of these problems up
and the total is 25.4 points for this message. The
full list of check performed is pretty impressive.
If spam is found the subject
line of the message has [*] added and the reasons are added
to the header of the message. Normally the headers are
not shown by your mail client.
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