Tired of getting hundreds of porn, Viagra, and fake marijuana advertisements in your email? Use
FreeBSD,
SpamAssassin, and
ProcMail to evaluate your incoming messages! Here's how:
1. Pick A Filtering Method And Install It
You can either
FilterMailWithSpamAssassinAndProcMail or
FilterMailWithSpamAssassinViaMilter. Pros and cons:
ProcMail?:
- If you've already installed ProcMail? on your system, then this is an easy addition.
- If you don't have ProcMail? already, then it's not so easy.
Milter:
- Easy to use and drastically reduces the complexity of installing SendMailAndCyrus.
- Requires a small amount of manual compiling and installation.
Choose your method, follow the instructions given, then come back to this topic.
Start using your new configuration:
/etc/mail# make; make install; make restart
Note: Test your new system immediately! Look at the output of
/var/log/maillog, send yourself a few emails, and make sure
that they're correctly delivered.
If you do not do this, you may silently lose mail without knowing it. If
anything fails,
then immediately type:
cd /etc/mail; make stop and fix or revert your
SendMail configuration before continuing.
Seriously. I mean it. Test your system
NOW!
3. Enjoy!
Congratulations! You've now installed
SpamAssassin and configured
SendMail to use it to process all incoming mail. If an email meets
SpamAssassin's criteria to be considered spam, then it will have an additional header added to it:
X-Spam-Flag: YES
Finally, configure your email client to move all emails with that header into their own folder (or delete them entirely, if you're feeling brave). A sample Gnus configuration is available at
EmacsWiki:SplitMailUsingBbdb.
Enjoy your newly-protected inbox! Reports of 90% decreases in spam content are pretty typical.
--
KirkStrauser - 03 Jul 2003