A Home-Grown Spam Filter

SPAM HUNTER

Article from Issue 52/2005

Author(s): OLIVER FROMMEL

Even if you do not have a mail server of your own, SpamAssassin can help you filter out unsolicited junk mail. This article describes how SpamAssassin collaborates with Evolution and KMail. Thunderbird, on the other hand, has its own simple spam-detection feature.

Spammers invent more perfidious tricks every day to confuse spam detection software. For example, they modify the text and subject line to leave just a minimum of legible information. They also add punctuation between the individual letters within a word to prevent simple tests for text strings: for example, V.a.l.i.u.m is not the same as Valium. SpamAssassin gives you the weapons you need to fight spam. SpamAssassin checks for gappy brand names and detects a whole range of suspicious products. Spammers who use tricks to slip brand names into your inbox are actually shooting themselves in the foot, because brand names of the types typically used by spammers are unlikely to occur in normal email messages.

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