SpamAssassin

SpamAssassin is an email filter program which can be used to identify and filter out spam messages. It works through Procmail. To enable it, you need to copy the default setup file into the top of  your .procmailrc file in your home directory, or create a .procmailrc file if needed. 

Warning: be very careful when using Procmail. If you are not familiar with it, read the man pages for Procmail first. 

After you modified your .procmailrc file, when the next new message arrives procmail will run spamassassin, which will create a .spamassassin directory in your home directory and put config files in there. You can also modify your personal settings as follows:

Edit the file user_prefs in the .spamassassin directory.

• Persoanl spam threshold: do this by changing the value of required_hits. The default value is 5. Decrease the value will  identify more messages as spam.
• Personal whitelist and blacklist.
• Other settings.

Change the destination of identified spam messages. By default they go to the files (almost-certainly-spam and probably-spam) in your home directory. You can edit the top part of .procmialrc to change these to:

• Where your mail folder is, e.g., $HOME/mail/probably-spam; or
• Delete immediately, e.g., /dev/null

To see a man page for SpamAssassin, run the command: perldoc spamassassin at chow prompt.