Spam Assassin
You probably know that Ben Trott of Movable Type fame has written a set of instructions for installing Spam Assassin on OS X*. What you may not know is how easy the instructions are to follow. It appears you can be virtually spam-free in no time at all.
Spam Assassin “uses a wide range of heuristic tests on mail headers and body text to identify spam” and it really works. It tags suspected spam in the subject line so you can easily filter it to the trash or, more cautiously, a mailbox dedicated to this purpose.
Because I have quite a few friends who still insist on sending out mail to large groups of people by putting all of the addresses in the To: field or who haven’t set up their accounts properly, I get a few more false positives than most people are reporting. But not enough to dissuade me from using Spam Assassin after seeing what a good job it does at removing the real crap.
Spam Assassin works by downloading your mail from a POP server (or multiple servers) and filtering it locally. It writes the standard mbox format to var/mail/<username> and you then tell your mail app to ‘check’ mail from this directory rather than from the POP server. Your mail app needs to be able to handle UNIX-type accounts, which Entourage can’t seem to do. Looks like I’m moving to Apple’s Mail program (I’m hoping for major improvements in the Jaguar version; its filtering is best decribed as rudimentary ;-). If you really wanted to use Entourage, you could set up IMAP locally and have Entourage read from that, but that’s a whole ‘nother step I don’t want to have to implement. I’d love to be able to use Mailsmith from Barebones, but its double-byte support is currently pretty sucky.
I used the excellent (and free) Cronnix to edit my user crontab so that the mail checking script runs at specified intervals (it’s just as easy to do in vi but, hell, give me a GUI and I’ll use it). If everything runs as smoothly as it seems to want to, I’ll move my other accounts over to this system in a few days and then it’s bye-bye spam forever!
* In step 2 of the instructions, it says to open your ~/.cpan/build directory. Although the installation of CPAN did create the .cpan directory, it also created a CPAN one. This in turn contained another .cpan and it was inside this .cpan that I found the build directory. If things aren’t excatly where the instructions suggest they’ll be, don’t worry. Hunt around a little, find what you need, and everything will still work just fine.
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Posted to Computers • 2002.08.16 (Fri) • 12:20
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