review by
Roger Walker, September 2004

For those of you who insist on doing it yourself despite the fact that EVS Mail exists at a reasonable price and has a 100% guarantee, this is the book for you.

I would have to say that spamassassin is one of the better freely available, though incomplete, spam control solutions in use today. The development team is steadily making improvements, and it has one of the most extensive lists of features available (however questionable some of them may be).

However, that's just my opinion of the software - now onto the book:

I am sure that if you dug around enough you would be able to find all of the information that has been distilled into this book. But since it's all here in one place, why look anywhere else? Seriously, for almost anything you would need to do with spamassassin, you will find the details right here.

Of course, there is the expected and typical introduction to spamassassin, including an overview of how it works, requirements, options, etc. Step by step instructions for building, installing, and testing are included not only here, but also in sections specific to several MTAs (i.e.: qmail, postfix, sendmail, and others).

I think that one of the most valuable sections is on spamassassin rules. If you really want to take advantage of spamassassin's filtering capabilities, which are considerable, you will want to know this material. This is especially the case since many of the supplied rules are misleading or just plain wrong, and you should know how to change them when you find them. I have been playing with a VERY narrow range of spamassassin's capabilities for possible use with EVS Mail, and I now have enough information to make this feature much more valuable for my purposes.

Similarly, there is a section devoted to spamassassin's learning systems: auto-whitelisting, and Bayesian filtering. As many know, I see no value in these (or in DNSBLs, clearing houses, etc.), but if that's all you have, then it just makes sense to learn how to make the work as well as possible. The book would not be complete without this, and other information.

And there's more! Make spamassassin work as a POP proxy - possibly important if you get email through an ISP that doesn't have a good solution, particularly if you retrieve to a Windows box.

Despite spamassassin's shortcomings as a spam control solution, it is steadily getting better, and this book is likely the best compilation of useful information available for this widely deployed software.