SpamAssassin is a popular spam classifier on Linux. This article assumes that you already have SpamAssassin installed and working.

When I set up SpamAssassin in Mandrake 9.2, it came very close to picking up 100% of my spam. Over time, however, many of the spammers have figured out how to fine tune their spam and bypass the default ruleset. I find the default setup still picks up at least half the spam, maybe two thirds on a good day, but too much leaks through. If the spammers are tuning their messages, I guess the only thing to do is to tune my scoring. There are at least 8 possible ways of improving SpamAssassin's hit rate.

By Neil Youngman at Linux Gazette.

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