Introducing SpamAssassin

I am pleased to announce the addition of SpamAssassin to WestNet's spam fighting arsenal. (To get right in and start catching spam, jump right to our Email Options Page. For more background, keep reading.)

For years WestNet user have had their e-mail protected by both our firewall and our custom-developed anti-spam rules. Our firewall's primary purpose is to protect our server from hacked or otherwise compromised machines. Since much spam is sent from compromised machines, it has had the added benefit of blocking a good amount of spam before it ever hits our network.

Our custom rules block many of the known advertisements that are sent repeatedly. Unfortunately, the volume of spam has gotten so large that maintaining this list is no longer practical. that's where SpamAssassin comes in.

SpamAssassin uses a large list of rules to determine the likelihood of a message being spam. Each rule is assigned a point value. By totaling the points of all the rules an e-mail message matches, a total score is assigned to the e-mail.

SpamAssassin may be enabled on your account via the web, from the Subscriber Info icon on our home page, under Set Your E-mail Options.

Keep in mind, however, that this is just a computer program. As such, it can make mistakes. In all likelihood, it will misidentify some valid e-mail as spam, especially in the beginning. We can train the system over time to become better. Also, we are developing more options for the interface, for example to allow users to explicitly allow mail from certain addresses (called whitelisting).

For this reason, SpamAssassin will currently simply tag the Subject: of suspected spam, including the point value the e-mail received. When you are comfortable with the mail it is marking, you can set up filters within most e-mail programs to move marked messages to a separate folder for later review. More information on doing this is available from within the E-Mail Options interface itself.

This sounds more complicated than it is. I invite you to activate SpamAssassin on your account, and see for yourself what it does. Any spam doesn't it identify, or valid e-mail that it does, can be forwarded to spam@westnet.com for use in further training the system.

Please let us know what you think of this system. This is a preliminary version of the interface. We wanted to get this up quickly so users could begin experiencing the benefits. Ongoing development is planned.