SpamAssassin

Chapter 2. SpamAssassin Basics

This chapter explains how to get and install SpamAssassin and its components, perform basic configuration, test the system, and start using it for spam-checking. It covers the basics of using SpamAssassin from the shell or from procmail, and discusses the setup of the daemonized version of the spam-checker. The configuration examples in this chapter provide only the basic functionality. The following chapters cover rule-tweaking, white- and blacklisting, and learning.

Prerequisites

SpamAssassin is written for a Unix or Unix-like environment that includes Perl Version 5, preferably 5.6.1 or later. Perl is now standard on most Unix systems, but if you don’t have it, the source code for Perl can be downloaded at http://www.cpan.org.

SpamAssassin requires several Perl modules to be installed. If you install SpamAssassin using CPAN (the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network), as described in the next section, these modules will be automatically downloaded and installed as well. If you install SpamAssassin manually, you’ll need to be sure that you also have up-to-date versions of the Perl modules ExtUtils::MakeMaker, File::Spec, Pod::Usage, HTML::Parser, Sys::Syslog, DB_File, Digest::SHA1, and Net::DNS. You may also want Net::Ident and IO::Socket::SSL if you plan to use the daemonized checker (spamd) and its client (spamc) and you will allow remote clients to access your daemon.

SpamAssassin can consult several spam checksum clearinghouses. ...