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SpamAssassin: A practical guide to integration and configuration

You're reading from  SpamAssassin: A practical guide to integration and configuration

Product type Book
Published in Sep 2004
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781904811121
Pages 240 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages

Table of Contents (24) Chapters

SpamAssassin
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
1. Introduction
1. Introducing Spam 2. Spam and Anti-Spam Techniques 3. Open Relays 4. Protecting Email Addresses 5. Detecting Spam 6. Installing SpamAssassin 7. Configuration Files 8. Using SpamAssassin 9. Bayesian Filtering 10. Look and Feel 11. Network Tests 12. Rules 13. Improving Filtering 14. Performance 15. Housekeeping and Reporting 16. Building an Anti-Spam Gateway 17. Email Clients 18. Choosing Other Spam Tools Glossary

The Auto-Whitelist


SpamAssassin manages an automatic whitelist (AWL). It actually functions as both an auto-blacklist and an auto-whitelist. Generally, an auto-blacklist is ineffective as spammers rarely use the same email address for any period of time. However, SpamAssassin tracks both the IP address of email sources and the email addresses used, adding to its effectiveness.

The auto-whitelist keeps a record of the SpamAssassin scores for emails from senders. Senders that only send ham emails receive a weighting towards ham by the auto-whitelist. If they later send an email marked as spam, then the SpamAssassin score for the new email will be adjusted downwards, due to their past behavior as a source of only ham emails. The converse is true of those who normally send spam.

The AWL works by adjusting the score of the email being processed towards the average of all previous emails received from that sender. The amount or strength of this adjustment can be altered using the auto_whitelist_factor...

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