

This doesn’t mean that emails rated 4.5 or 4.9 are headed straight to spam.

The tool can be set to any base value, but most commonly ‘5’ is used.

The lower the score, the higher the chance of an email landing in an inbox. SpamAssassin analyzes each email and gives it a score. Other popular platforms that utilize SpamAssassin include EmailonAcid, Mail-tester, and Glock Apps. It’s also incorporated into Mailtrap as one of the tools for testing emails before they’re sent to end-users. SpamAssassin is also widely used as a tool for email deliverability testing. It incorporates various anti-spam techniques, which include Bayesian and DNS filtering, or the so-called SpamAssassin blacklist. It’s a tool that can be easily installed and set up on a mail server to filter out unwanted emails. What is SpamAssassin?Īpache SpamAssassin is a popular, open-source solution developed by Apache back in 2001. How do you do it right? How do you understand the SpamAssassin score, and how do you set it up properly? That’s what we’re going to discuss today. To avoid such a fate, email senders use SpamAssassin and its score to improve their emails. As a result, they sometimes send legitimate emails to spam or discard them altogether. Spam filters can never be 100% error-proof. One of them is SpamAssassin.īut, as is frequently the case, there’s a flip side to this medal. We should give some credit to various anti-spam solutions that have emerged over the years. Luckily, modern inboxes have become extremely efficient in filtering out unwanted messages so we don’t actually see most of these emails. Saying that it’s everywhere wouldn’t be an overstatement. If you’d still like more information on SpamAssassin, a good place to go is SpamAssassin Rule Help, and you can always pop over to the SpamAssassin site itself.Spam easily makes up the majority of emails sent worldwide. Immediately after editing your configuration file to ensure that you haven’t introduced any errors or typos into the ruleset!

You can do the opposite instead, as shown here: header ITS_DEREK ALL =~ ITS_DEREK -100įinally, you can also reassign the scoring of built-in rules too, by simply restating the score: score SUBJ_FREE_CAP 4.0įinally, don’t forget to always run the command spamassassin -lint I just try to use sufficiently mnemonic rule names.ĭon’t be fooled into thinking that you can only match rules and have things be more spammy. The first thing you’ll notice is that I don’t bother with the description field. Here are two actual rules from my own SpamAssassin rule set: rawbody BECAUSE_OPTIN /because you opted-in/i Having shown that, I use rawbody rather than body so that it catches words that appear in HTML formatted messages and messages with base64 or any other encoding scheme. In this case, any message that contains “Vioxx” (without regard to the mix of upper and lower case, which is what the ‘i’ accomplishes in the pattern) will be given a score of +10, which might by itself make this an undelivered spam message (it actually depends on what threshold you specify in your configuration file).
#Spamassassin black list install#
While I’m also a big fan of SpamAssassin, I’m the first to admit that the rules can be more than a bit confusing, and when you have a bad rule, odd things can occur, especially if you don’t actually test your rules before you install them.
