Mon Dec 10 13:53:38 PST 2001 — New email filtering tools. We are in the process of evaluating SpamAssassin for integration into our suite of email filters. For the past few weeks our early testers have reported good success with SpamAssassin and we feel that it is ready for more widespread testing by our users. To make it easier for our users to evaluate this too we’ve created a new membertool, ‘The SpamCan,’ which can be used to turn SpamAssassin on or off. The SpamCan can also be used to toggle some of our other email filters as well. We intended to have all of our email filters SpamCan enabled shortly.
SpamAssassin tags email which it believes to be spam by adding headers and by modifying the subject (which can be turned off) and then includes a detailed explanation of why the mail was tagged in the message body. SpamAssassin is fully user configurable; users are able to add whitelist and blacklists, as well as modifying scores and thresholds. In our own testing, SpamAssassin has demonstrated itself to be over %95 effective in correctly tagging spam. Users are then able to use procmail or mail filters built into their email clients to filter the tagged spam to a junk mail folder. We do not recommend deleting tagged messages.
Before enabling SpamAssassin on your account or if you have questions about it or any of our email filters please review the local newsgroup news://news.sonic.net/sonic.antispam and post your questions there. If you are currently using SpamAssassin inside of your own procmail.rc we recommend that you use our tools to turn it on or off instead. -Kelsey