spam virus

SpamAssassin is a computer program released freely under the Apache License 2. 0 used for e-mail spam filtering based on content-matching rules, which also supports DNS-based, checksum-based and statistical filtering, supported by external programs and online databases.

SpamAssassin is generally regarded as one of the most effective spam filters, especially when used in combination with spam databases. Even simple text-matching alone may, for most users, be sufficient to correctly classify a majority of incoming mail.

History

SpamAssassin was created by Justin Mason who had maintained a number of patches against an earlier program named filter. Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus Announcement. plx by Mark Jeftovic, which in turn was begun in August 1997. Mason rewrote all of Jeftovic's code from scratch and uploaded the resulting codebase to SourceForge. net on April 20, 2001.

Methods of usage

SpamAssassin is a Perl-based application (Mail::SpamAssassin in CPAN) which is usually used to filter all incoming mail for one or several users. It can be run as a standalone application or as a client (spamc) that communicates with a daemon (spamd). Spam Help at AOL. The latter mode of operation has performance benefits, but under certain circumstances may introduce additional security risks.

Typically either variant of the application is set up in a generic mail filter program, or it is called directly from a mail user agent that supports this, whenever new mail arrives. Mail filter programs such as procmail can be made to pipe all incoming mail through SpamAssassin with an adjustment to user's. procmailrc file.

Anti-spam techniques

SpamAssassin comes with a large set of rules which are applied to determine whether an email is spam or not. example: joe234@jumbowidgetscocom.