All email today gets relayed through a number of servers befor it gets to its destination. The servers have software called SpamAssassin which is an open-source software package which applies a variety of textual and other tests to messages in order to estimate the likelihood that they are spam. This likelihood is represented as a number, the spam score. It adds headers to a scanned message containing indications of the spam score assigned to it, and the mail system then continues processing the message as normal.
If you take a typical piece of spam and examine the header you will find something like this at the bottom of the header:
Directions for using this spam score to divert spam into a seperate folder are included in the url above, it works with Outlook 2000, Outlook 2002, netscape 4 and netscape 7 for windows, but not outlook express which lacks the ability to read mail headers. I've found that setting my filter at (5) ***** works well.
This is not a spam killer, but is a good spam management tool, it gets better than 95% of the spam out of my inbox. I only spend a couple of seconds looking through the headers in the spam folder before I trash them.
[ June 09, 2003, 08:25 AM: Message edited by: TransLab ]
Posted by Bruce Williams (Member # 691) on :
Sounds pretty good. I'd like to read what they say about it in alt.spam and similar newsgroups. I gather that spam now accounts for closer and closer to half all business e-mail in the US. If this continues, then e-mail won't work.
I still recommend that we first use all the anti-spam tools given to us free, like SpamCop and Sam Spade, and report this ****. Most people don't do this, I'm told, and if that's so, then what could they possibly expect to do next?
