SpamAssassin

Setting up a SpamAssassin Filter

SpamAssassin is a mail filter to identify spam. We currently have versions 2.63 and 3.1 installed. If you want to use SpamAssassin to filter spam out of your EECG mail, follow the following steps:

If you are already using SpamAssassin 2.63 and want to upgrade to 3.1:

[This method will wipe out your current Bayes database. If you want to keep your current Bayes database, email me for somewhat more complicated instructions to sync the old DB up to the new format.]

temporarily rename your .forward file to something else (i.e. mv .forward .forward.temp );
delete your Bayes database files (rm ~/.spamassassin/bayes_*);
edit your .procmailrc and change the line that reads "| /local/bin/spamassassin" to "| /local/bin/spamassassin3";
restore your .forward file (i.e. mv .forward.temp .forward );
if you were in the habit of training spamassassin with sa-learn ("man sa-learn"), make sure you use sa-learn3 from now on.

If you are not currently using SpamAssassin at all:

create a .procmailrc file in your home directory. Your .procmailrc should look something like this unless you use one of mh/nmh/xmh/exmh to read your mail -- in which case your .procmailrc should look like this instead;
create a .forward file with the following 1-line content:
```
 "|IFS=' ' && exec /local/bin/procmail -f- || exit 75 #your_login_name"
```
where your_login_name is your username. Note that the double quotes and the pound sign in the line above are part of the content;
make sure that both .procmailrc and .forward are readable to all;
send yourself a test message and make sure you receive it (to verify that you have not inadvertently misconfigured things so badly that you cannot receive e-mail);
keep an eye on your procmail log file (e.g., ~/Mail/procmail_log) for the next little while, to make sure that your mail is being sent to the correct destination.

Important Note: it's possible that SpamAssassin may sometimes flag legitimate mail as spam. From time to time, you should examine the mail that SpamAssassin saves in the caughtspam folder. You should never configure your mail filters to discard automatically mail detected as spam by SpamAssassin.

Other filter:We also have another spam filter installed (bogofilter): it performs considerably better than spamassassin. See my instructions to install it.