Spamassassin And Custom Rules

Spamassassin is the well recognised and defacto spam filtering software for nearly every single MTA (Mail Transport Agent) currently in use. It's Open Source and well maintained.

3DPixelNet uses Spamassassin to filtering incoming mail on the shared hosting platforms and uses custom rulesets from open source communities around the world.

The first thing to remember is, Spamassassin is firstly and foremost a service to mark emails as spam. It is not a mail filtering service. It is not going to magically reduce the spam coming into your inbox.

It will however, allow you to easily filter out junk email from good by rewriting the subject of your emails. e.g. if you received an email titled "Hello Bob" and Spamassassin scored it above the spam threshold, it will rewrite the title to "*****SPAM***** Hello Bob".

If you don't want to see this spam you can easily filter it in our mail clients. We're going to show examples with Apple Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird and Microsoft Outlook. Why do we filter rather that simply remove? The most frightening thing to a business (or individuals for that matter) is to lose a legitimate email. Spamassassin is absolutely fantastic, but it's not perfect. It could remove an email with a £1 million order. Can you run the risk? This method will siphon off the spam to a folder which won't prompt you as a new mail and you can review this folder as and when you wish.

Apple Mail

The following screenshot shows what all of us hate. Spam emails mixed in with legitimate emails offering things nobody really wants.

... to be continued

Mozilla Thunderbird

... to be continued

Microsoft Outlook

... to be continued