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SpamPal, SpamAssassin Make War on Spam

If you're looking for weapons in the war on spam, you may want to investigate SpamAssassin (http://www.spamassassin.org/) and SpamPal (http://www.spampal.org.uk). Both of these programs employ filtering techniques to help screen out annoying (and sometimes malicious) junk mail.

SpamPal may be downloaded for free, and it works with standard email programs such as Outlook, Outlook Express, or Eudora, on Windows machines (it is not recommended for Unix-based machines). SpamPal uses a variety of rules to screen incoming mail, tag suspected spam, and file it in a separate folder.

You can download an open-source version of SpamAssassin for Unix systems from http://www.spamassassin.org/

Commercial versions of SpamAssassin come in two flavors (Pro 2003 for Outlook 2002 and Enterprise 2003 for Exchange servers)*, and Deersoft also distributes a commercial Eudora plug-in called Spamnix.

SpamAssassin supports a variety of mail systems and employs a wide range of heuristic tests to screen for spam, including header and text analysis, blacklists of known mail abusers, and the Vipul's Razor spam-tracking database.

Neither SpamPal nor SpamAssassin are the ultimate answer to the spam problem, and they may not be ideal tools for everyone. However, if you're fed up with spam and want to experiment, these anti-spam tools may be worth looking into.


* A 14-day free trial of SpamAssassin Pro is available from http://www.deersoft.com/sapro.html For more information on Deersoft's antispam products, see http://www.deersoft.com/collateral/

Winter 2003 Computing News | Computing Center Home Page