Spamassassin Docs

You're probably reading this because you just recieved an email which SpamAssassin believes to be spam. There are three things you may be thinking:

  1. Yes, this is spam, but what does all this junk mean?
  2. No this isn't spam! I want to get these emails!
  3. I don't care what some computer program thinks, just leave my email alone!
If you're thinking something else, then read on!

1. What to do with correctly identified spam

SpamAssassin works by comparing the email against a huge set of tests, and generating a score accordingly.

If the score for the email is five or above, then it's classed as spam. In the message it adds a list of all the tests it did, and what their individual scores are. It probably won't make any sense to you, but you needn't really worry anyway!

If the message is indeed junk, then you can safely just delete it and forget about it.

It's possible to make your email client automatically move all emails that SpamAssassin has tagged into a seperate folder, (which is handy if you recieve lots of spam, since it'll stop it getting in the way of your legitimate emails. I'll update this doc at some point to give details on how to achieve this.

2. Preventing messages being marked as spam in future

Because SpamAssassin is just a computer program that compares emails against a long list of "rules" that try and define what's spam and what isn't, there will be times that it will get it wrong and mark legitimate emails as spam. This is most likely to happen with the kind of mailing lists that online shops send to let you know what their current offers are (it's not psychic, so it doesn't know you actually want these particular emails, which often are hard to tell apart from real unwanted spam.)

However there is a simple fix, just tell it that email from that particular address is never spam.

To do this, log in to the Spam Assassin control panel (click here) using your email username and password (remember, just the bit before the @ in your email address) then click on the Allowed and Denied Addresses button

At the top of the page is a box titled From: addresses to never classify as spam, here you just need to paste in the From: address from the newsletter that you want to recieve (e.g. newoffers@someshop.com) or even simpler just use *@domain.com to allow all emails from that particular domain.

Another thing you can do while you're here, is import all the email addresses from your email program's address book. Your email program will have an export option, which you need to select Comma Seperated Values (or CSV) format, and which will save out a text file. No go back to the Allowed and Denied addresses page, and click the Browse button at the bottom of the page, and select your exported address book, then click the Import Now button.

The text box at the top should now contain all your contacts, which will prevent any email sent from them as being marked as spam

Now just scroll to the bottom and press Save

3. Turn off SpamAssassin for your mail account

If you really want to prevent SpamAssassin tagging any more of your emails as spam, then you'll need to log in to the Spam Assassin control panel (click here) using your email username and password (remember, just the bit before the @ in your email address) then click on the Spam Classification button

Where it says Hits above which a message is considered spam click on the second radio button, then type 1000 in the text box.

This basically says to SpamAssassin that all email isn't spam, since no email is likely to score such a big score in its tests

Now just click the Save button at the bottom.