SpamAssassin Protection Program

SpamAssassin Email Filter

We at AlterHosting understand the importance of spam probelm, and take every possible step to protect you and your organization from unsolicited commercial and bulk email. SpamAssassin™ is an effective tool, it's included in all hosting packages, and FREE for all AlterHosting clients. Together with rblsmtpd program, they help to keep greater part of unsolicited commercial and bulk email off your mail boxes.

SpamAssassin™ is an extensible email filter which is used to identify spam.
Using its rule base, it uses a wide range of advanced heuristic and statistical analysis tests on mail headers and body text to identify "spam", also known as unsolicited bulk email.

SpamAssassin Tactics

The spam-identification tactics used include:

• header analysis: spammers use a number of tricks to mask their identities, fool you into thinking they've sent a valid 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 (to put it politely), and some characteristic disclaimers and CYA text. SpamAssassin can spot these, too.
• blacklists: SpamAssassin supports many useful existing blacklists, such as mail-abuse.org, ordb.org, SURBL, and others.
• learning classifier: SpamAssassin uses a Bayesian-like form of probability-analysis classification, so that a user can train it to recognise mails similar to a training set.
• distributed hash databases: Vipul's Razor, Pyzor and DCC are collaborative spam-tracking databases, which work by taking a signature of spam messages. Since spam typically operates by sending an identical message to hundreds of people, these databases short-circuit 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 Features

SpamAssassin™ Features include:

• Wide-spectrum: SpamAssassin uses a wide variety of local and network tests to identify spam signatures. This makes it harder for spammers to identify one aspect which they can craft their messages to work around.
• Free software: it is distributed under the same terms and conditions as other popular open-source software packages such as the Apache httpd project.
• Easy to extend: Rules, weights and user-visible text are stored in text configuration files as much as possible, which the user (or sysadmin) can edit to modify or add new rules.