My company is beta testing SA even as I type this. I signed up for the test 3 weeks ago, and so far it's given me only one false positive out of about 300 pieces of SPAM. Now I have to figure out how to get my local preventers of information services to enable procmail filtering on our local server so I can dump it all to /dev/null before it hits my inbox.

Hey Merlin--use Eudora. It reads POP mailboxes and IMAP ones too, and it just went final for OS X.

Thx, Bob! You rock.

Yeah, I'm already a 7-year user of Eudora (now on OS X), and I haven't had any luck setting up a UNIX account. It's the one thing Mail.app actually does really well and easily, and Eudora doesn't seem to do it. :-(

Maybe I'm missing the "Esoteric Settings" or something. BTW, I'm [quicktopic at undisclosedlocation dot com] if this is OT.

merlin if you're talking about an os x mail client that will read a local unix-style mbox mail box you might try looking at pine or mutt... they're command-line but should work on os x.

cypherpunks you can minimize the number of false positives by setting up a good whitelist. i've got whole domains in my whitelist which i know spammers won't generally spam 'from'. false positives are very rare in my spam filter. i go thru the 'spam' box every month or so.

i also keep the amount of spambox mail down by filtering easy to identify spam right to /dev/null, and thus never have to look at it (for example, anything (not on my whitelist) which has the word 'viagra' in it, deleted instantly :)

i use a homebrew procmail filter tho, not spamassassin.

Could someone post or link to a good tutorial on setting SA up on a OS X iMac? Thanks.

Just posted: Ben Trott's the man behind the Spam Assassin on OS X solution. The how-to is here and extremely complete (I did it this weekend and it works). It is not supported by Ben (so don't ask for help), but he is interested in hearing if something is genuinely busted. Don't sweat it though; if you follow his directions most folks shouldn't have a problem.

Thanks a million to Ben. He is, as always, the man.

First Bruce Sterling plugs Spam Assassin *twice* in his blog, now Simson & Cory. Guess I'd better look into it.

Why not just use procmail like peolple have been doing for years? I do, and I never get spam anymore. There's tons of info on the web on how to configure it. Like this ass-assin it works on your Unix server, but is a part of Unix.

Edited by author 06-13-2002 12:14 PM
Another great way to reduce spam is provided by http://www.spamgourmet.com - they give you the possibility to create new email addresses on the fly wich only accept a certain number of mails and then stop forwarding to your main mail address.

Anyone here know how spamassassin compares to junkfilter(http://http://junkfilter.zer0.org/)? I've been using junkfilter, and while it works very well, i still get approximately 10 spam e-mails daily.

Is there a link to the original Simson article?

Chaka - That *IS* the original Simson article. Original publication right here on boingboing.

Could we get these put in a sub-page somewhere and just an excerpt on the main page? It takes up too much room to have the whole article sitting there.

It would be nice if the article could be viewed by itself, so that I could pass a link to managers without them being distracted by the other boingboing content, as fine as it is.

Edited by author 06-13-2002 04:13 PM
http://www.streettech.com has a link to the original article on one of their frontpage blogs. Simson also has an email list you can subscribe to.

"Why not just use procmail " sayeth Charo.

SpamAssassin uses Procmail to work its magic. It seems to be more nuanced.

That would be this, ChakaTodd:

http://boingboing.net/2002_06_01_archive.html#85165134

and ditto cypherpunks' suggestion. For something of this length, it'd be nice to split the article and use a 'MORE' link.

Kickstart 70: my recently installed version of SpamAssassin stores the sorting rules in the /rules directory, a bunch of files that end in .cf

None of those files have the line beginning with "score" that you include. Which .cf contains these rules? Thanks.

rawbody GW_NEW_NIGERIAN /Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation/i
score GW_NEW_NIGERIAN 5.00