This page is part of the EmailServer article.

Improving spam filtering

SpamAssassin comes with the ability to use custom-rules used to add/remove points to each message passing through.
As a result there are a number of rule lists available that are regularly maintained to contain the filtering rules against the latest spam and other more serious threats.

On interesting project is Rules Du Jour at Exit0Wiki, a SpamAssassin-dedicated site.
It is in fact a script that allows you -using a configuration file- to download an install a lot of rule files from various sources without having to worry about manually deploying them yourself.

Installation

To install Rules Du Jour is simple enough and here is a quick recap.

This will have downloaded the script and made it executable by root and created the blank configuration file that we now need to fill.

My config file contains all available rules. Just remove the ones you don't need and don't forget to change the notification email address to something suitable to your site.

Now we just need to make this run daily (please only run once per day to avoid stealing too much bandwidth from the sites that kindly give us these free goodies).
Update your crontab y issuing crontab -e on the command line and appending the following on a new line:

Change the time to something else to even-out the load on the servers that we will download from.

Now the last thing we can do is try to run the script. It will output a lot of info as each rule is downloaded and installed.
Once all are done, spamassassin will test them and if no errors are reported, will restart itself.

You should now have another, improved layer of email protection.

Resources

• The Rules du Jour website

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