SA3 – RC3

Julian released a set of scripts to install Spam Assassin RC3 yesterday for both rpm and non-rpm based distros.
You can get them here and maybe you’ll have more luck with them than I did
I couldn’t get it to work on the Whitebox machine I was trying to install it on, as it would not overwrite the contents of /usr/share/spamassassin
After trying to rectify this in a number of ways I finally opted for a “clean” install using the tar.gz from the Spam Assassin site.
Word of caution: If you are using custom rulesets you may need to remove them first, as a lot of them are now part of SA3’s code.
There are a number of new features in SA3 that should make it more interesting:
– Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::URIDNSBL – SURBL – available via a plugin that ships with it. I must have a closer look at the scoring on this
-Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::SPF – Checks for SPF content
-Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::RelayCountry – fairly obvious, though I’m not sure what we can do with the output
-Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::Hashcash – not 100% sure what that does 🙂
Update: I did a bit more research into Hashcash. The concept is quite interesting. In essence you “earn” the right to send email by “spending” CPU cycles. As each email requires you to “spend” resources before you can send it a spammer would not be able to send the same volume of email, while a “normal”, “legitimate” user would not even notice the slight delay.
More information is available on the Hashcash site.