SpamAssassin, Procmail, and Fetchmail, Oh My

by
Annika Backstrom
in Uncategorized on 13 April 2003. #Computers#Spam

I followed Mark Pilgrim's lead and set up SpamAssassin tonight, with some help. I've actually been pretty lucky in the spam department, with one spam every couple days. Having a dummy account with aliases helps, plus I get to see exactly where people are getting my address from.

Here's the lowdown on my current setup:

  1. Mail is delivered to my bwerp.net address.
  2. Every 10 minutes, fetchmail pulls e-mail from bwerp.net and delivers it to annika@localhost.
  3. sendmail consults my .forward file, which says "filter mail through procmail."
  4. procmail in turn filters all mail through SpamAssassin
  5. Any messages marked as spam are moved to my ~/Maildir/junk folder.

Pretty slick, if I do say so myself. Next step: consolidate my e-mail accounts through fetchmail and procmail.