Information about SpamAssassin in Debian

?SpamAssassin is an extensible email filter which is used to identify spam. It has a wide range of features, uses DNSBL tests, heuristics, bayesian classification and other concepts to tell your spam from ham.

The official ?SpamAssassin homepage is at [http://spamassassin.apache.org/]

Versions of Debian Packages

As ?SpamAssassin is a targetting a moving target, it is wise to keep it quite up-to-date, as spammers adapt to the filters to get their spew through.

Setting up Exim 4 and SA 2.64 to reject spam at SMTP time

It is fairly easy to set up Exim4 and SA to reject spam in the SMTP dialogue, that is, while the spam is still in transmission and your system is still talking to the spammer.

First of all, you need the [exim4-daemon-heavy] which has exiscan-acl. The latter allows scanning messages. Then, you need SA installed, and just follow the documentation [http://duncanthrax.net/exiscan-acl/ exiscan-acl-docs].

What's up with SpamAssassin 3.0.0?

?SpamAssassin 3.0.0 was released on 2004-09-22, and was uploaded to Sid a few days later.

Unfortunately, some Debian developers report huge memory consumption: [http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=275232 Bug275232], which is one of the things preventing it from entering testing. The ?SpamAssassin Developers are onto something [["SABug3776"] http://bugzilla.spamassassin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3776], though, but the question remains if the issue can be resolved in time for Sarge's release.