On our shared hosting platforms we make use of Spamassassin filtering which as an open source project as part of the Apache Foundation integrates with most modern mailservers including Qmail (which we use).

The default spamassassin configuration is quite basic and whilst it will filter with reasonable success, spamassassin depends on user configuration as it ‘learns’ what is spam and what isn’t. Obviously this is a very personal choice. A rule for one person or company is not suitable for another. A church email server will not have the same rule requirement as a pharmaceutical company producing Viagra.

We found a community generated site called RulesEmporium that produces spamassassin rulesets in very specific groupings. We’ve installed a very customised selection into our spamassassin configuration with no particular bias for or against certain word groups. We consider it simply enhancing the default spamassassin configuration so spam does actually get marked as spam on a general web server serving hundreds of people. Obviously the rulesets require some tweaking which was done at the start, removing and adding groups etc..

The rulesets are constantly updated via a scheduled downloader called rules_du_jour (Rules of the day). I don’t actually remember where we obtained this file from, you may be best simply searching. Set up a cronjob (scheduled task) to call this file once a day with your configuration inside, simply edited by a text editor, and Bob’s your uncle.

Don’t forget though spamassassin is primarily a ’spam marking’ service. It’s not going to delete the emails that cross the threshold of spam unless you configure it to do so. I don’t recommend this, too much chance of a false positive. Simply configure your email client of choice to move emails with *****SPAM***** in the subject to a junk folder, and mark as read (so you don’t get told when they arrive). Check once a day.

Certainly works for us. I see an email that gets through maybe once every 2 weeks.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 10:01 am and is filed under Web Hosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.