On 2/22/2017 5:29 AM, Gregor Uwe Esterweil wrote:
Dear mailinglist-recipients,
I'm heading forward to an essay for IT class about actual spamblocking
mechanisms.
Doing some early research for my paper I found out that some
antispam-/mailsecurity-providers
like Barracuda Networks provide an live interconnection between their
appliances to have a nearly
live reaction on all their nodes to spam-sources.
Is there something similar for spamassassin?
No. There is no communication between unrelated SpamAssassin
installations. It is possible to set up multiple installs to share
things like Bayes databases and various custom stuff, but this is
something that has to be done manually.
As far as I found out spamassassin uses some real time blacklists to
check if a host (based on domain
name or ip) is a known source of spam.
But on which data are these RBLs based on?
Depends on the RBL. Each one has it's own listing (and de-listing)
policies. AFAIK, all of them are separate entities and are not related
to the SpamAssassin project.
Does every spamassassin-installation automatically provide data to
RBLs (or similar services)
and contributes this way to their services?
If that's the case, which information is shared by spamassasin?
The RBLs do their own data collection separate from SpamAssassin.
If you set up Razor, Pyzor, or DCC, then SA will share some information
with them since they all work based on shared information. To find out
exactly what is shared, you would have to look them up individually. As
with the RBLs, these are services that are used by SA, but are not
affiliated.
Is there any other automatic contribution by a
spamassassin-installation to improve the further
development of spamassassin for example?
Not automatically, but SpamAssassin users who wish to contribute to SA
rule development can use the MassCheck program to check the SA rules
against a list of hand-sorted ham and spam. This is used to determine
how to score the rules based on how much ham vs spam are hit by the rule.
I would appreciate if you link any additional information sources you
know.
I don't know of any sources besides the official SA documentation.
--
Bowie
