Index Previous Next

Email:Spam

How do I reduce the amount of Spam I receive?

The amount of spam being mailed around is getting beyond a joke.

My mail is delivered to a FreeBSD machine via sendmail, and I have been using procmail with a set of custom rules I've gradually honed to filter it out, but with only moderate success.

Today I discovered a fantastic program called spamassassin that plugs-in to procmail via a few extra lines in the .procmailrc configuration file, and so far, it is looking good - it has filtered out all but one spam email that I've received this evening.

Spamassassin is an executable and a set of Perl modules. If you already have Perl 5, installation is easy, as follows:

1. Become root
   

       $ su 
   

2. Run the Perl CPAN tool:
   

       # perl -MCPAN -e shell
       cpan> conf prerequisites_policy ask
       cpan> install Mail::SpamAssassin
       cpan> quit
   

I thoroughly recommend it.