[conspire] anti spam

[Adam Cozzette]

On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 10:43:27AM -0700, roger at rogerchrisman.com wrote:
> What level of success are others having who are still handling ones
> own email spam filtering?
> 
> What anti spam tools are you using to do it?

I've done pretty well using spamassassin, which I've been using for a year or
two now. It catches most of my spam and has had few false positives so far. You
can train its Bayesian filter by indicating emails as "spam" or "ham" and you
can also set it to train itself automatically based on what it has determined
about emails using its other heuristics.

It takes some work to configure, though. I use a .procmailrc to run emails
through spamassassin and then send them to the right folders based on the
result, and I also had to set a couple of macros in my email client, mutt, for
marking emails as spam or ham (to correct errors when SpamAssassin gets it
wrong). I've also heard that you need to train the Bayesian filter on a fair
number of messages before it can give you any useful results, so that may take a
while.

-- 
Adam Cozzette
Harvey Mudd College Class of 2012