Error: I'm afraid this is the first I've heard of a "writeback" flavoured Blosxom. Try dropping the "/+writeback" bit from the end of the URL.

Sun, 30 Nov 2003

Get rid of spam now! ivmsgrznwddpkplt su yztowmdh

I've recently enabled SpamAssassin on my mail server and it's incredible how efficient it is.

The filter will run on the mail server itself and not the mail client on your machine and it basically gives 'points' to mails depending on the criteria they match.
If the threshold you set is reached, the mail is classified as spam and you can either delete it on the server and you won't even see it in your mailbox, redirect it to another mail account or receive it but with a tag (***SPAM*** is added to the subject).

I personally find dangerous to delete the mail directly if you are worried about false positive (mail being detected as spam while it's not), although it never happened to me.

Instead, I use my mail client to move the mails tagged as ***SPAM*** directly into a folder, so that I can delete everything at once.

Actually, before deleting them, I also like to read the mails themselves. Not really because I'm worried about false positive ones, but more because SpamAssassin adds the details of the points given to the mail and it's actually kind of fun to see what tricks the spammers use.

The highest score a mail got so far is 46.4, while only 7 are required to be classified as spam in my configuration!

As you can see in the list of tests performed on incoming mails, there is not much chance for spam to get through!

And if SpamAssassin is not able to detect the mail as spam, the junk filter on Thunderbird usually takes care of that :)