Dahnielson

Today I got sick of spam. Previously it hasn’t bothered me that much since pretty much all “real” email I recieve get sorted into virtual folders by sender and email lists and everything left in the unsorted inbox was unwanted emails that I could delete. But today I had enough. Not by the amount of spam, but the waste of time checking messages to make sure I did not delete any valid ones by mistake.

So I decided to sing along and installed Spamassassin. It use a multitude of methods to classify the incoming emails each assigning it averaged score and if the message total score reach above a threshold it is flagged as spam. It is great, combining all state-of-the-art spam filtering methods, and really simple to integrate either at the mailserver or at the client side (like my case).

I just had to create a filter rule in Evolution (Outlook inspired PIM for Linux but better by magnitudes) to pipe emails I recieve to Spamassassin that respond with a non-zero if email is classified as spam upon Evolution save the email in a “Junkmail” mailbox. Spamassassin even include bayesian filtering, so now and then I run it on my spamfree mailbox file and my spam-infested junkmail mailbox file to improve the filtering even more.

A great report about where spam come from called Why Am I Getting All This Spam? have been posted by the Center for Democracy & Technology. It also gives some simple rules of thumbs preventing your email address getting harvested in the first place, but still be able to give it out, backed by research restults.

Oh by the way, there is some SPAM I still like…