rootninja

The Apache SpamAssassin Project just had a new major release, 3.3.0.

Like other anti-spam apps, SpamAssassin uses a mixed bag of tricks to determine spaminess including bayesian statistical filtering, checksums, blacklists, and a “wide variety of local and network tests to identify spam signatures.”

From most to least important:

1. It works.
2. It’s free.
3. It’s easy to configure.

What more could you ask?

Everything you need to get started setting up, you can find in their wiki:
http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/

Since it’s perl based, you can also get Mail::SpamAssassin through CPAN.

There’s also configuration generator here:
http://www.yrex.com/spam/spamconfig.php

Click the radio buttons and select a few checkmarks and it does the rest for you. You can download the tarball and build RPMs directly from it. I wish more apps would make sure this worked.

sudo rpmbuild -tb Mail-SpamAssassin-3.3.0.tar.gz

The only problem is there’s a bunch of prerequisites you probably don’t have installed that you’ll need to take care of first.

Required packages to build on Fedora 12:

sudo yum install the following…

rpm-build
auto-buildrequires
perl-String-ShellQuote
perl-Digest-SHA1
perl-Digest-HMAC
perl-Net-DNS
perl-devel
perl-Test-Harness
perl-ExtUtils-ParseXS
perl-ExtUtils-MakeMaker
perl-Package-Constants
perl-IO-Zlib
perl-Archive-Tar
perl-NetAddr
perl-Crypt-OpenSSL-Bignum
perl-Digest-SHA
perl-Crypt-OpenSSL-Random
perl-TimeDate
perl-Crypt-OpenSSL-RSA
perl-MailTools
perl-Mail-DKIM

The RPMs that get built are:

perl-Mail-SpamAssassin-3.3.0-1.$ARCH.rpm
spamassassin-3.3.0-1.$ARCH.rpm