26.7 SpamAssassin
Defense against spam is a battle against windmills that can probably never be won. In this section, I will show you how you can at least reduce the flood of spam by using the SpamAssassin program. SpamAssassin tries to decide whether an email contains spam or not based on various criteria. Reasons that lead to a spam classification include missing reverse DNS entries, obviously incorrect DNS details, or the origin of emails from known spammers—that is, from computers that have ended up on blacklists due to mass sending of spam.
SpamAssassin also takes the content of the email into account. The latter requires a relatively complex analysis, which causes a high CPU load on busy email servers. The results of the various spam ...
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