HadleyNet.Org: Blogtastic

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Jun Aug

Updated: 16/8/02; 2:16:56 pm.

Wednesday, July 10, 2002

I get a shed load of spam every day and I'm sick of it. Time to draw the line and instead of just manually trawling through my inbox and weeding out the crap an automatic solution is required.

Fortunately while reading the Times on Sunday I spotted a reference to something called SpamAssassin and after reading the docs for a bit I decided to give it a go. If you are using OS X, here are the steps I followed to get it up and running (if you're using another Unix like OS the you can probably skip to item 3).

1) If you are running 10.1.5 then the first thing to do is get your Unix mail up and running. The 10.1.5 update basically nobbled sendmail so you have to follow these instructions to get it working again (I turned on the DontBlameSendmail option).

2) Once you've done that you then need to follow these instructions to help sendmail get its addressing act together.

3) Now you can install SpamAssassin by following this walkthrough. This walkthrough is a bit OS X specific, but if you are at all experienced in other Unix-like OSs then you should be able to follow it. (sudo is an OS X command that executes the command following it as root.)

Once you've done all that you can test it and ta da - all the spam gets filtered off to its own separate folder !

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