April 29, 2003

Spam Assasin for Windows, for free.

I was reading through some of my regular blogs today about new email clients and stumbled upon this: a Windows compatible version of SpamAssassin called SAproxy.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with SpamAssasin, it's an open source spam killing machine based on a rules engine. It systematically examines each of your emails one by one, running a slew of tests on each. Tests can check for any number of things, such as included phrases like "FREE", "Double Your" or "million dollars" or crazy from email addresses that contain a bunch of random letters and numbers and end in hotmail.com. Each test has an assigned value. The value of each test is added together to get the final spam value. If this value is greater than a certain amount, the message is marked as spam.

I've always wanted to try out SpamAssassin, but installation was far from easy for Windows users. Now it's as easy as double clicking an .exe and making slight changes to your mail accounts in your favorite mail client.

I ran the old version of saproxy for about 3 weeks. Although it suffered from frequent crashes (which may be fixed in the new version that has since been released), it did a decent job of detecting spam. If you use a POP mail client to check your mail and you get a lot of email about refinancing your home, enlarging your penis, or sending money to Nigeria, this is probably a good place to start.

It didn't compare with my current nerdmonkey spam strategy, but explaining that is for another time.

Posted by Eli at April 29, 2003 02:52 PM | TrackBack
Comments

I found SAProxy just last week and tried it out. On the positive side, it brings SpamAssassin to Windows, and it is really pretty good about weeding out the junk. On the negative side, I've also found that it crashes a lot, too. Usually when I'm away from my PC, so that I have to manually restart it when I come back and want to check my mail.

If only it were more stable, I'd stick with it. As it is, I'm finding it less annoying to just manually delete all the spam from my inbox.

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