No, not on filtering spam about Linux out of your inbox. One of the most exciting things that an email junky experiences is opening up their email client and seeing a high count of unread messages. One of the biggest downers is noticing that most or all of those messages are spam. The good news is that if you’re not using one of the many free email providers and, instead, use a registered domain name, there are several options available to filtering your emails automatically so you can apply the time spent reading and deleting spam every day for something more constructive — like playing squash.
The options available are split into to very different groups: those that want to filter themselves and those that want someone else to filter them.
Filtering Yourself
By far the first solution presented to filtering spam on Linux systems is the open source project Spamassassin. Spamassassin has been deployed in many extremely large mail servers, proving it can stand up to millions of messages every day. So it can easily handle the thousands of message the average email junky goes through every week even on a low-end server with minimal intervention and maintenance. With the Bayesian classifier that Spamassassin employs, it can learn what you consider to be spam and what you don’t — one junkies spam is another’s ham, of course.
Letting Someone Else Filter Yourself
This is the perfect avenue for the email junkie who’s always on the go and doesn’t have the time to administer his own custom solution. There are too many directions to cover but it basically comes down to two different methods: shifting all hosting and mail routing to a third-party service, or, shifting only the mail routing to a third-party service.
When shifting everything to a third-party service you alleviate yourself from all of the maintenance chores; the web services, the webmail software, the MTA — all somebody else’s problem. Possible solutions include Google Apps and FastMail, who will provide spam filtering, web and IMAP access and other features.
Routing all mail through a third-party is simple enough: just change the mail exchange (MX) record for your domain’s DNS. This way, all mail will first hit the filtering service and anything that’s not tagged as spam will end up in your inbox. One of the more popular services is Postini.
A Solution for Every Situation
Filtering spam in this day and age is no longer the rocket science that was hit or miss that it was not five years ago. It’s become simple enough that anyone can set up some kind of solution to meet their needs. Of course, spam filtering is a constant game of catchup with the spammers so don’t expect any one solution to rid all spam out of your inbox.
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