Drizzle Internet NW-FAQ-Spam Assassin

What is SpamAssassin? How can I harness its mighty powers?

SpamAssassin is a powerful tool for automatically identifying which of your incoming e-mail messages are spam and which are not. Instead of having to pick your way through your daily inbox, SpamAssassin "tags" spam e-mails so you can quickly identify and delete them.

Like the Linux operating system itself, SpamAssassin is an open-source project under very active current development. You can find more information about the project at the SpamAssassin home page.

SpamAssassin uses a sophisticated "genetic" algorithm to identify spam e-mails. Essentially, SpamAssassin "learns" what spam e-mails look like, and changes its rules as spammers change their strategies. While not perfect, it has an extremely high success rate for distinguishing between spam and non-spam e-mail.

Unlike other filters which try to reduce your spam, SpamAssassin actually parses or "reads" the entire contents of your mail, not just the addresses in the headers. We at Drizzle Internet respect your privacy and assure you that SpamAssassin simply parses the body of each e-mail once and makes its rating without storing any of your private information. It is an automated system without human intervention, so it does not compromise the privacy of your e-mail in any way. SpamAssassin is only enabled for users who specifically desire it and turn it on themselves. Users are free to disable SpamAssassin at any time.

To enable SpamAssassin, you must do the following:

1) Make a telnet or ssh connection to drizzle.com
2) Type "sh" to enter the Unix shell
3) Type "dsafe" to start the SpamAssassin configuration utility
4) The program will tell you SpamAssassin is disabled. Type "E" to enable SpamAssassin or "Q" to quit and not enable SpamAssassin.

To disable SpamAssassin, follow the same instructions above, but type "D" to disable it.

Once enabled SpamAssassin will immediately begin parsing all new incoming e-mail messages and tagging those that it believes are likely spam. When you get a spam message, you can easily identify it by the subject line which will begin with: *****SPAM*****. You can then quickly scan and delete these tagged e-mails, if you choose.

Advanced Setup
What do you do with the e-mails that have been tagged as spam? You filter them and shoot them off into a folder labeled say, "Siberia," where you can periodically check them for any false positives, then delete the rest.

Disclaimers:
Drizzle offers SpamAssassin as a courtesy to our customers. The service is offered to you AT YOUR OWN RISK. You must read and understand the following disclaimers before using SpamAssassin.

SpamAssassin does an excellent job of identifying spam, but it is not perfect. Sometimes it may tag as spam an e-mail which you actually wanted and were expecting. This is called a "false positive" and it is most likely to happen with e-mail from discussion mailing lists or e-mail from commercial businesses. For this reason we HIGHLY recommend that you scan your tagged e-mails for subject lines or senders which you recognize. Do NOT simply delete all the e-mail that is tagged as spam without inspecting at least the subject and the sender. You need to be aware that Drizzle cannot be responsible for any accidental deletions of false positives by you.

In addition, SpamAssassin may sometimes miss an e-mail which is clearly spam. Some spammers are extremely clever and are able to craft their junk messages in such a way as to get past SpamAssassin's sophisticated algorithm without being tagged.

The maintainers of SpamAssassin are vigilantly updating the SpamAssassin rule base to catch these kind of spams, but once in a while, some will sneak through. If this happens, please do NOT notify Drizzle support. Drizzle is committed to keeping SpamAssassin up-to-date. When the next stable version comes out with updated rules, we will install as quickly as we can.