Greetinngs,

Check out its feature on how it works.

–> There are several ways that SpamAssassin makes up its mind about a
message:
–> The message headers can be checked for consistency and adherence to
Internet standards (e.g., is the date formatted properly?).
–> The headers and body can be checked for phrases or message elements
commonly found in spam (e.g., “MAKE MONEY FAST” or instructions on how to be
removed from future mailings)-in several languages.
–> The headers and body can be looked up in several online databases that
track message checksums of verified spam messages.
–> The sending system’s IP address can be looked up in several online lists
of sites that have been used by spammers or are otherwise suspicious.
–> Specific addresses, hosts, or domains can be blacklisted or whitelisted.
A whitelist can be automatically constructed based on the sender’s past
history of messages.
–> SpamAssassin can be trained to recognize the types of spam that you
receive by learning from a set of messages that you consider spam and a set
that you consider non-spam. (SpamAssassin and the spam-filtering community
often refer to non-spam messages as ham. )
–> The sending system’s IP address can be compared to the sender’s domain
name using the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) protocol (http://spf.pobox.com)
to determine if that system is permitted to send messages from users at that
domain. This feature requires SpamAssassin 3.0.
–> SpamAssassin can privilege senders who are willing to expend some extra
computational power in the form of Hashcash.
Spammers cannot do these computations and still send out huge amounts of
mail rapidly. This feature requires SpamAssassin 3.0.

Most of SpamAssassin’s behavior is controlled through a systemwide
configuration file and a set of per-user configuration files. The per-user
configuration can also be stored in an SQL database.

How to Configure it ? : -
——————-

You can easily customize how SpamAssassin tags and identifies spam by
creating a spamassassin/user_prefs file. You can customize the number of
“spam points” required to identify a message as spam, create new rules, and
re-weight existing rules. Here is a sample user_prefs file. It raises the
threshold for identifying spam from 5 to 6, disables including spam warnings
in the subject and body, reweights a known rule, and adds several blacklist,
whitelist, and header rules.

Listing 1. A typical user_prefs configuration file

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#How many hits before a mail is considered spam?
required_hits 6

#Don’t mangle the messages so badly
rewrite_subject 0
use_terse_report 1

#whitelist and blacklist
whitelist_from *@www.zzzzzz.com
blacklist_from annoying-person@xyz.com

#reweight an existing rule
score BASE64_ENC_TEXT 3

#add some new rules
header KNOWN_LIST List-Id =~ /a-mailing-list-i-like/
score KNOWN_LIST -3

body EVITE /This invitation was sent to you by .* using Evite/
describe EVITE Looks like an eVite
score EVITE -3

================================================================

Enjoy..