This is not the
SpamAssassin home page! This page is for our end-users.
Click here for the SpamAssassin home
page.
Spam
Assassin
The system we are using to tag junk mail is called SpamAssassin. The system uses a scoring system to decide if a e-mail should be marked
as spam. Click on the links at the left for instructions on filtering with your mail client. The majority of our customers use Outlook Express as a mail program. The instructions for your mail client tell
you how to move spam to it's own folder or just delete it automatically.
Let us know what you think
Let us know what you think of this system - we want to know! Is this useful? Annoying? Catches too much good e-mail or
misses too much spam? Let us know what you like or dislike and we will see what we can do about it. Your feedback is very helpful to us.
If you would like to have your mail
exempted from this system please let us know.
We can easily exempt your mail from SpamAssassin processing. If you find
that valid mail sent to you is being marked incorrectly we would appreciate you
reporting that to us - it will help us fine tune the filters.
Privacy and e-mail security issues
Please note that this is an automatic system - your e-mail is scanned by machine and at no point does anyone read your e-mail. The contents of the e-mail are altered only by the addition of the
spam signature to the subject line and to the headers that you normally do not see. E-mail is NOT DELETED by this system and you will not loose mail even if it is incorrectly marked as spam (unless you configure YOUR
system to automatically delete mail).
How SpamAssassin detects junk mail...
If you go to the SpamAssassin web site you will see many references to 'Procmail' and 'Perl'. The SpamAssassin web site assumes you are using a Unix (rather than Windows) mail system - most of the instructions on the
web site do not apply to you.
The main things that SpamAssassin looks
for are suspicious items in the headers of e-mail (the processing information
for delivering the mail) and for common things that Spammers put in the e-mail
messages - things like "this is not spam", "complies with senate
bill", etc. A single suspicious item in an e-mail is
usually not enough to get a message marked as spam - it takes multiple
'hits' to cause mail to be marked.
Junk mail has many distinctive 'markers' and SpamAssassin assigns a numeric value to each of these. If the sum of the values assigned to the message exceeds a set threshold the e-mail is marked
as spam. Here is an example of how an e-mail is scored using a sample spam message. SpamAssassin found the following things wrong with this e-mail:
* 1.2 -- From: does not include a real name
1.2 points because there is not a real name of the person who sent it.
* 1.6 -- From: ends in numbers
1.6 points since the person who sent it had an e-mail address ending in numbers (Health_Center5@healthforyou.com). The rest of the
things wrong with this message include:
* 2.0 -- Character set doesn't exist
* 2.0 -- Invalid Date: header (no timezone)
* 0.8 -- Subject has an exclamation mark
* 2.0 -- BODY: /mailto:[a-z]+\d{2,}\@/is
* 2.1 -- BODY: /remove.*subject/i
* 3.9 -- BODY: /subject.*remove/i
* 2.0 -- BODY: /mailto:\S+\?subject=[3D=\s"']*remove/is
* 2.0 -- BODY:/\n\n.*mailto:\S+\?subject=/is
* 4.0 -- Character set indicates a foreign language
* 1.8 -- No MX records for the From: domain
Add all of these problems up and the total is 25.4 points for this message. The full list of check performed is pretty impressive.
If spam is found the subject line of the message has
[*] added and the reasons are added to the header of the message. Normally the
headers are not shown by your mail client.
