SpamAssassin

SpamAssassin is run on every email message that is delivered to a CS email account. It is not run on messages that are forwarded to other email addresses via system mail aliases or .forward files.

SpamAssassin gives each email a score representing the degree to which SpamAssassin believes the email is spam. Negative numbers indicate a strong likelihood that the message is legitimate (i.e. not spam). The default threshold for treating an email as spam is a score of 7, but that can be changed.

Filtering Spam

Although SpamAssassin gives every email a spam score, it is up to you to do something with that score, so SpamAssassin has no effect unless you filter your mail with Procmail. For information about that, please see Filtering Spam with Procmail.

Customizing SpamAssassin

You can also change SpamAssassin's configuration, which allows you to customize things like its threshold score for classifying a message as spam, its treatment of spam emails, and details of is scoring decisions. For more information about that, please see SpamAssassin Configuration.