After installing SA, you should immediately notice a dramatic decrease in the amount of spam that makes it to your Inbox. The SA developers do a tremendous job of writing and thoroughly testing the rules that determine each incoming message’s spam score. Moreover, a default install of SA incorporates several means of detecting spam, including Bayesian-style probabilistic classification, email header and body analysis, and much more. (For a full list of rules, see http://spamassassin.apache.org/tests_3_1_x.html.)
While the default SA rules are comprehensive, spammers are extremely tenacious and inventive. By utilizing the modular nature of SA, you can enable additional plug-ins to help you catch a significant amount of additional spam, while keeping false positives relatively low.
To ensure you’re getting the most out of SA, verify that you’re using the package appropriately. Do you have bayes enabled and working properly? Just as importantly, are you training it? Are your network tests running properly? A cursory check should be able to verify all this, and can make a substantial difference.
Next, look at the “Optional Modules” section of the INSTALL file. This section details which CPAN modules are needed to enable additional SA functionality. Some of them, such as Net::DNS are absolutely vital (Net::DNS is used for all DNS-based tests including SBL, XBL, SpamCop, and DSBL, among a variety of other DNS-related tasks). Once you…
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