SpamAssassin: A Practical Guide to Integration and Configuration [Paperback]

Alistair McDonald (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 27, 2004

Spam has become a serious problem for businesses, wasting employees time and costing millions of dollars. To combat this growing problem, a number of applications and services have been developed, and SpamAssassin is one of the most effective and popular open source solutions. Free to use, flexible, and effective, SpamAssassin has become the most popular open source antispam application. Its unique combination of power and flexibility make it the right choice. This book will now help you set up and optimize SpamAssassin for your network. As a system administrator, its down to you to implement, configure, and adapt SpamAssassin to fight the Spam War. Fortunately, in SpamAssassin you chose well. Its power and flexibility make it a potent tool. However you also know that any flexible application is only as good as how its set up and configured. This book is a comprehensive guide to the features, options, and implementation strategies you need to get the most of out SpamAssassin. If you are a network or system administrator and you're either using or evaluating SpamAssassin, this book will increase your understanding and transform your productivity.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Alistair McDonald is a freelance IT consultant based in the UK. He has worked in IT for over 15 years and specializes in C++ and Perl development and IT infrastructure management. He is a strong advocate of open source, and has strong cross-platform skills. He prefers vim over vi, emacs over Xemacs or vim, and bash over ksh or csh. He is very much a family man and spends as much time as possible with his family enjoying life.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (September 27, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1904811124
• ISBN-13: 978-1904811121
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,427,958 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well written and up to date, February 7, 2005

By 

Michael Spoonfield (Garfield, NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: SpamAssassin: A Practical Guide to Integration and Configuration (Paperback)

This excellent book is the only title I've found that covers the latest version of the SpamAssassin. It is an easy introduction

to installing, configuring, and fine tuning SpassAssassin, but it thoroughly covers all the topics I'll ever need to know about. I'm a beginner to SpamAssassin, and now feel like an expert! Even friends who already knew SpamAssassin well find themselves looking at this when they get stuck.

I found the book had plenty of coverage of SURBL. There's a whole chapter dedicated to using network tests to check URL blacklists.

Highly recommended.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Woulda been 5 stars ..., July 13, 2005

By 

S. Witten "niteflyer" (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: SpamAssassin: A Practical Guide to Integration and Configuration (Paperback)

... except that the book is full of typos and formatting mistakes. Don't attempt to use it without access to the SpamAssassin documentation. Once I got past that, the book is pretty useful and informative.

5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars SURBL is the key idea, December 3, 2004

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: SpamAssassin: A Practical Guide to Integration and Configuration (Paperback)

SpamAssassin is a common and free antispam method that is comprehensively described by this book. McDonald is writing for a sysadmin who wants an effective method to halt spam. To be sure, he cautions that SA is not 100% effective. He gives concise explanations of how to install and run it.

The most recent version surveyed here is 3.0. And there is one key innovation in it, and also in the earlier 2.63 version. Namely what it calls SURBL = Spam URI Real time Blacklist. A powerful idea. You block a message as spam, if its body has URIs in an SURBL. It should be said that it took the SA coders a long time to recognise and implement this idea.

Another issue is how to generate an SURBL. Here, the author just says that you can get these from external sources, like Spamhaus, just like you would for an RBL. More discussion here might have been helpful.

There is little recognition in the book that the SURBL method has significant advantages over a Bayesian, the latter of which gets extensive coverage. The SUBRL method is faster in extracting URIs from a message body and then comparing against the SURBL, than in comparing the message's words to the corpus of the Bayesian. All the more so if the latter word comparision is restricted to words that are not in HTML tags and are visible to the reader.

Also, if the SUBRL has domains that are definitely considered to be spammer domains, then using it is deterministic. Unlike the stochastic general nature of SA's approach, which totes up a spam likelihood score. The deterministic aspect is far stronger.

Plus, there is no need for regular manual training, as with the Bayesian - either at the user or sysadmin level. But a casual reader will miss all this. The SURBL is given minimal description.