| New O'Reilly book attacks spam |
Aug. 24, 2004
 A new book from O'Reilly helps system administrators set up the freely available email filter software Spamassassin. The open source software is used to identify spam through a rules-bases system and utilizes a range of advanced heuristic and statistical analysis tests on mail headers and body text to identify unsolicited bulk email -- commonly known as spam.
According to O'Reilly, Spamassassin is regarded to be the most widely deployed anti-spam tool in the world. O'Reilly says "SpamAssassin," by Alan Schwartz, provides a complete resource for mail system administrators, network administrators, and Internet service providers or anyone who wants to regain some control over the growing nuisance of spam.
The book covers 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 according to the publisher. Instructions in the manual cover topics such as the customization of rules, training the "Bayesian" classifier to optimize it for the sort of email users typically receive, block specific addresses, hosts, and domains using third-party blacklists, allow administrators to "whitelist" known sources of email, and to configure SpamAssassin to work with newer spam-filtering methods such as Hashcash and Sender Policy Framework (SPF).
In a statement, author Schwartz says that "System administrators pay for spam with their time. The Internet's email system was designed to make it difficult to lose email messages: when a computer can't deliver a message to the intended recipient, it does its best to return that message to the sender. If it can't send the message to the sender, it sends it to the computer's postmaster--because something must be seriously wrong if both the email addresses of the sender and the recipient of a message are invalid."
Spam costs companies significant resources. In addition to time IT must spend on the problem, experts estimate that almost $2,000 in lost wages per employee per year, according to a June 2004 report by Nucleus Research, and that figure counted relatively low levels of spam noted the firm.
"SpamAssassin Basics," which is Chapter 2 in the book is available online. A sample chapter, table of contents, author bio's, and more is available at O'Reilly.com. The book can be ordered online for $24.95.
The Spamassassin software can be downloaded from the project's website.
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