The aspam program is intended for use on Unix/Linux systems which provide mail delivery services. On such systems, mail is delivered to an "inbox" file for each user. The inbox file is simply a concatenation of the messages received for that user by the system. This file is read and manipulated by the user's mail client program, allowing the user to read, respond to, and dispose of individual messages in the file. In some cases, the entire file is transferred to another machine by a POP server, usually to support Windows users.

If run periodically or before the mail client or POP server is invoked, aspam will keep the inbox substantially free of spam messages, which have been placed in a "spambox" file. The user should check the spambox periodically for possible messages of interest that were identified as spam, and delete the file after reading any such messages.

Aspam is intended to be a flexible, portable, and effective spam filtering tool, and is very much a work in progress. It is offered as "free" software with the hope that it will be used and improved by others, and contribute to the fight against spam.

• There is now a DNSBL query interface allowing aspam to determine if the message originated from a known spam site. DNSBL is a service similar to the domain name resolving service on the Internet that will return whether or not a given address is "blacklisted".

• The program now maintains a local database of "bad" originating addresses. Once a spam message is identified, its originating address is added to the database, and future messages originating from that address will be considered spam. The database maintains a count of received messages, so it is possible to see which addresses are producing the most spam.

• The program maintains a database of words extracted from messages, that is used to perform a Bayes probability analysis on messages as a further test for spam characteristics.

• The program has an expression interpreter and rule/action clause which allows the user to create custom tests and perform various actions.

• There is a new interactive mode, where the message queue can be examined, and various operations can be performed.

• aspam Documentation

• aspam Change Log

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