If you run your own mail server you’ll want it to run spam filtering software to reduce the number of unsolicited emails your users receive.  SpamAssassin is an effective spam filter that’s relatively easy to install and run.

This article was written for a CentOS 6.0 server running Postfix and Dovecot, but SpamAssassin can work with other operating systems and is compatible with most other common mail server software.

Installation

The first thing we will want to do is run an update on our CentOS distribution if we haven’t already.

Once the distribution has been updated, we will want to install SpamAssassin using yum.

sudo yum install spamassassin

Now that we have installed SpamAssassin onto our mail server we will need to configure the SpamAssassin rules within the local.cf file to set filter preferences. Continue Reading