SpamAssassin : A Practical guide to Configuration, Customization and Integration

Leading the Fight against Spam, for Free!

Every second e-mail you receive will be Spam...

As a busy administrator, you know that Spam is a major distraction in
today’s network. The effects range from inappropriate content arriving in
mailboxes, to contact email addresses placed on a website being deluged
with unsolicited mail, causing valid enquiries and sales leads to be lost,
wasting employee time. The perception of the problem of spam is as big as
the reality.

In response to this growing problem, a number of free and commercial
applications and services have been developed to help network
administrators and email users combat Spam. Free to use, flexible, and
effective, SpamAssassin has become the most popular open source antispam
application.

So what makes SpamAssassin the right choice for your network?
”Effectiveness and configurability for me” explains Alistair
McDonald, author of SpamAssassin: A Practical guide to Configuration,
Customization and Integration. ”SpamAssassin works pretty well out of
the box, but a small amount of time spent with it can reap great
rewards. Typical figures quoted are 80% effectiveness out of the box, and
95% with some minor customizations.”

SpamAssassin allows external Spam filtering services to be integrated. It
uses a plug-in approach so that it's easy to add support for a new
technique – when SURBLs came in, a SpamAssassin plugin was developed to
use them. Now, the plugin is part of the main SpamAssassin
distribution. The SpamAssassin community reacts quickly to changes in spam,
and new rules or plugins are available very quickly. It's not just in spam
filtering that SpamAssassin excels, it's also very flexible in how it's
configured. If you want all users to share spam definitions, it's easy to
do. On the other hand, if you want all users to use individual settings,
again, it's easy. Or a group of users can share settings, while others have
their own. Flexibility extends to trapping spam. If you are bothered by a
particular type of spam, you can write your own rules to detect it – or
you may find that someone else has already published a third party ruleset
that deals with it.”

Alistair McDonald’s book is a comprehensive guide to the features, options,
and implementation strategies you need to get the most of out SpamAssassin,
helping you to set up and optimize it for your network.

++ENDS++

Further Information for Editors

What you will learn from this book 
This comprehensive and detailed guide answers all your SpamAssassin
questions. You will learn about:
 
o	Spam detection and prevention 
o	Installing and running SpamAssassin 
o	Using Bayesian Filtering 
o	Configuring mail clients 
o	Rewriting spam messages 
o	Integrating SpamAssassin with external services 
o	Blacklisting and whitelisting 
o	Increasing Performance 
o	Using SpamAssassin as a service 
o	Using SpamAssassin with Fetchmail, postfix, sendmail, Exim, Qmail,
        procmail
o	SpamAssassin rules

Approach 
Written specifically for busy network and system administrators, the book
is a detailed and practical guide to implementing the right antispam
solution for your network and your business requirements. You’ll go from a
detailed walk through of initial set up, to advanced configuration options
like Bayesian filtering, listing, rewriting, and rules. The book shows how
to optimize SpamAssassin for all major mail servers and clients.


Who this book is written for 
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.


Alistair McDonald
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.


Additional Resources
www.SpamAssassinBook.com   
A comprehensive website dedicated to Alistair McDonald’s book. Containing
the full Table of Contents and two free chapters, this website is an ideal
showcase for those interested in purchasing the book.

For more information about the book, visit Packt’s website:
www.packtpub.com/book/spamassassin 

For a cover graphic: http://www.packtpub.com/images/100x123/1904811124.png  

SpamAssassin: A Practical guide to Configuration, Customization and Integration
ISBN: 1904811124, Pages: 220, $35.99, £22.49, €33.29
contact@packtpub.com 
www.PACKTPUB.com   


About Packt Publishing
Packt publish books that aim to help you get things done with software. The
company’s books are different in two ways:

Focused 
They have developed a business model that allows them to publish books on
areas that might otherwise be left without quality independent
documentation. They do this by focusing on selling direct and online. This
reduces wasted expense and means it's profitable for authors and for Packt
to publish the focused books that you need.

Fresh
Many of the topics Packt cover are rapidly evolving, often with multiple
releases each year. Because every book they sell is printed individually,
they can keep their material fresh and up to date. This is not possible in
the old book publishing model.