Today is my birthday, a day you do not intend to spend behind a computer screen, but I couldn’t resist to tell you about the success I had yesterday evening. I’ve got spamassassin working on my mail-server. The install is still very rough and not something I’m keeping as is. But it works ! I still need to train the filter a bit more and have been feeding my personal mail archive through it as well as some archives from the Spam Archive.

It works by adding header information in the mails and changing the subject line to indicate the email as spam. It was a very difficult process to get it working as there was little documentation available on the internet how to get it to work in a simple setup. On OS X server it comes pre-installed and it just a point and click. Large parts of the documentation found was about setting it up together with Clam-Av for virus checking and Amavisd-new to let it all work together, which were all related to setting it up on a linux or freeBSD clone.

I still need to tweak the setup and document the installation procedure, which means re-installing it on my test server and write everything down. The installation itself is relatively simple but configuration isn’t. The other thing I would like to do is to get some scripts running that will help in training the filter continuously. This would mean not just feeding all the spam mails that have been received through the learning program but also the mails from everybody’s inbox that isn’t spam. I still need to put some thinking work into that one. But keep hanging on, it’s coming !