SpamAssassin

There are a lot of ways you can improve SpamAssassin. One of the best things you can do is to train it. That way it will learn what is spam for you and what is not.

To train SpamAssassin, you first need to ssh (or telnet ) to a machine with SpamAssassin on it. Either draco.gac.edu or oachs.it.gac.edu should work. Then you need to use the sa-learn command and pass it a mailbox that is either spam or not spam. For example if I want to tell SpamAssassin that my Filtered_by_GAC mailbox is all spam, I would run this command:

sa-learn –spam –mbox Mail/Filtered_by_GAC

Then you should also train SpamAssassin on mail that is not spam. Or in SpamAssassin’s terms, ham. This is an example where I tell it that I have a mailbox called it-staff that has valid email in it:

sa-learn –ham –mbox Mail/it-staff

Depending on how much mail you have in the mailbox you are training on, it can take several minutes or more to train it. Also you need to train it on at least 200 spams and 200 hams before it will start to use that information in scoring your email.

And lastly, if you really want to get into it, you can write your own Spamassassin rules or just adjust your own scores for the existing rules. You can learn more about how to do that from the spamassassin.org website.

If you would like any assistance training SpamAssassin or adjusting the scores on certain rules, I would be glad to help.