By Alan Schwartz
First Edition
July 2004
Pages: 222
ISBN 10: 0-596-00707-8 |
ISBN 13: 9780596007072
(Average of 2 Customer Reviews)
Sys admins can field scores of complaints and spend months testing software suites that turn out to be too aggressive, too passive, or too complicated to setup only to discover that SpamAssassin (SA), the leading open source spam-fighting tool, is free, flexible, powerful, highly-regarded, and remarkably effective. The drawback? Until now, it was SpamAssassin's lack of published documentation. This clear, concise new guide provides the expertise you need to take back your inbox.
"Detailed, accurate and informative--recommended for spam-filtering beginners and experts alike." --Justin Mason, SpamAssassin development team
Full Description
- Customize SpamAssassin's rules, and even create new ones Train SpamAssassin's Bayesian classifier, a statistical engine for detecting spam, to optimize it for the sort of email that you typically receive
- Block specific addresses, hosts, and domains using third-party blacklists like the one maintained by Spamcop.net.
- Whitelist known good sources of email, so that messages from clients, coworkers, and friends aren't inadvertently lost.
- Configure SpamAssassin to work with newer spam-filtering methods such as Hashcash (www.hashcash.org) and Sender Policy Framework (SPF).
Cover | Table of Contents | Colophon
Featured customer reviews
It is about what is under the hood, June 07 2005
This is a book for anyone who wants to know what is under the hood. This books details what is behind the engine, its architecture and its learning system. While it is leaning more heavily in the mail transfer agent (MTA) side, it still offers a lot of tips to readers as to how one can use SpamAssassin to combat junk mail. The Autowhitelisting and Bayesian Filtering are a must for those who really want to know how to use the tool. This is what makes it different from other keyword based filtering. This would be a great book for those who run and maintain their own mailing server, because it has lots of details for sendmail, postfix, exim and qmail.
Although the author has a section on pop mail configuration, I would like to see more client configuration examples such as outlook express or Novell's evolution/Ximian, or kmail. This is because not everybody runs email server at home. Nonetheless, this is a great book for those who want to set up their own spam mail filters and get rid of those annoying junk mail. Additionally, the author provides a very detailed list of resources.
SpamAssassin, May 18 2005
As in all things O'Reilly, a great book. I think that the section on custom rules could be beefed up and clarified a bit. Could also benefit from a page or two discussing regexp.
Media reviews
"...this is a great book for those who want to set up their own spam mail filters and get rid of that annoying junk mail."
--James Ko, Amazon.com Review, June 2005
"[SpamAssassin] can be arcane. Powerful, but arcane. And, when it comes to publishing books about powerful, but arcane products, O'Reilly tends to get it right. They did as well with this one. If you need to manage or set up SpamAssassin, then SpamAssassin is your book."
--David Giwirtz, OutlookPower.com, February 2005
"...Schwartz's SpamAssassin is the item of choice for anyon who would customize its rules, create new rules, and take full advantage of SpamAssassin's advanced features..."
--Bookwatch, February 2005
