| The annoyance factor for individual users whose email is
crammed with pitches for pornography, absurd moneymaking
schemes, and dubious health products is fierce. But for
organizations, the cost of spam in lost productivity and
burned bandwidth is astronomical. While society is grappling
with a solution to the burgeoning crisis of spam
proliferation, the pressure is on system administrators to
find a solution to this massive problem in-house. And fast.
Sys admins can field scores of complaints and spend months
testing software suites that turn out to be too aggressive,
too passive, or too complicated to setup only to discover
that SpamAssassin (SA), the leading open source
spam-fighting tool, is free, flexible, powerful,
highly-regarded, and remarkably effective. The drawback?
SpamAssassin's lack of published documentation.
SpamAssassin by Alan Schwartz, is the only published
resource devoted to SpamAssassin and how to integrate it
effectively into your networks. This clear, concise guide
clarifies the installation, configuration, and use of the
SpamAssassin spam-checking system (versions 2.63 and 3.0)
for Unix system administrators using the Postfix, Sendmail,
Exim, or qmail mail servers, helping administrators make the
right integration decision for their particular
environments.
It covers concrete advice on how to:
Customize SpamAssassin's rules, and even create new ones
Train SpamAssassin's Bayesian classifier, a statistical
engine for detecting spam, to optimize it for the sort of
email that you typically receive
Block specific addresses, hosts, and domains using
third-party blacklists like the one maintained by
Spamcop.net.
Whitelist known good sources of email, so that messages from
clients, coworkers, and friends aren't inadvertently lost.
Configure SpamAssassin to work with newer spam-filtering
methods such as Hashcash (www.hashcash.org) and Sender
Policy Framework (SPF).
Sys admins, network administrators, and ISPs pay for spam
with hours of experimentation and tedious junk email
management, frayed user tempers, and their sanity.
SpamAssassin, together with this essential book, give you
the tools you need to take back your organization's inboxes.
"Detailed, accurate and informative--recommended for
spam-filtering beginners and experts alike." --Justin Mason,
SpamAssassin development team
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Biting the hand that feeds IT 
Published by: O'REILLY & ASSOCIATES