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How to Get Started with Spam Assasin

SpamAssassin™ is a mail filter that identifies spam. Using its rule base, SpamAssassin™ uses a wide range of tests on mail headers and body text to identify "spam", also known as unsolicited commercial email.

Once your email address apears on the spammers' mailing lists, it's almost impossible to remove yourself completely; your address is already "out there" and circulating, being bought, sold, traded, shared and stolen on the spammers' market. For a variety of reasons, spammers frequently use any of a variety of methods to hide the the "From:" and/or "Reply-To:" email addresses in their messages. Spammers usually try to conceal their messages' true point of origin to evade discovery of their actual identity and avoid responsibility for their actions.

The spam-identification methods that SpamAssassin ™  utilizes includes:

• Header Analysis: Spammers use a number of tricks to mask their identities, and to fool you into thinking they've sent a valid e-mail, or fool you into thinking you must have subscribed at some stage. SpamAssassin tries to spot these.
• Text Analysis: Again, spam mails often have a characteristic style, and some characteristic disclaimers and CYA text. SpamAssassin can spot these, too.
• Blacklists: SpamAssassin supports many useful existing blacklists, such as mail-abuse.com, ordb.org or others.
• Razor: Vipul's Razor is a collaborative spam-tracking database, which works by taking a signature of spam messages. Since spam typically operates by sending an identical message to hundreds of people, Razor short-circuits this by allowing the first person to receive a spam to add it to the database -- at which point everyone else will automatically block it.

Once identified, the mail can then be optionally tagged as spam for later filtering using the user's own mail user-agent application.

SpamAssassin requires very little configuration; you do not need to continually update it with details of your mail accounts, mailing list memberships, etc. It accomplishes filtering without this knowledge, as much as possible.