This page covers published books that discuss the installation, use, and administration of SpamAssassin. (Please use alphabetical order by the title of the book.)

  • The Anti-Spam Tool Kit, by Paul Wolfe, Charlie Scott, and Mike Erwin (2004, Osborne, ISBN: 007223167X). SpamAssassin is mentioned throughout the book, but three chapters are completely devoted to it. Chapter 6 includes installation and configuration information, Chapter 7 contains information on Bayes with SpamAssassin, and Chapter 8 includes advanced configuration options. This books covers a number of popular anti-spam client and server tools for Linux, Windows, and Macintosh. It also covers overall spam-reduction strategies and DNS Black Lists. More information can be found at the Osborne web site (http://www.osborne.com) and the authors' web site (http://www.anti-spamtoolkit.com). (CharlieScott)
  • SpamAssassin, by Alan Schwartz (2004, O'Reilly Media, Inc, ISBN: 0596007078) is completely devoted to the installation, configuration, and use of SpamAssassin 2.6 and 3.0. The Bayesian and autowhitelisting systems are covered (including new SQL- and LDAP-based approaches), as well as how to write new rules. In addition to covering SA itself, it includes doc umentation for implementing anti-spam gateways using SA and sendmail (with MIMEDefang), postfix (with amavisd-new), exim (with sa-exim or exiscan), and qmail. Pop3 proxies are also discussed. More information can be found at the O'Reilly web site (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/spamassassin/index.html). (AlanSchwartz)
  • SpamAssassin - A Practical Guide to Configuration, Customization, and Integration, by Alistair McDonald (2004, Packt Publishing, ISBN: 1904811124). This book is devoted to SpamAssassin and spam. It covers the basics of spam, including popular techniques by both sides of the war to stay ahead of the other. It then covers the installation and configuration of SpamAssassin, including features released in version 3.0, such as SURBLS. Details are given on integration with sendmail, Posfix, Exim and qmail, and also on installing SpamAssassin under Microsoft Windows. One chapter is devoted to creating an email gateway to filter spam from an existing system, possibly Microsoft Exchange, guiding the user from choosing and installing a PC and Linux distribution, through installing and configuring SpamAssassin onto switching the system on. More details, sample chapters, code downloads and more are available from the publishers web site: http://www.packtpub.com/book/spamassassin. (AlistairMcDonald)