Boyung.com

Obviously, I have my own domain name and my own website, which you know, because you are on it right now.  What you may not know is that this website is running on a server in my basement.  I've also got Exchange running as our e-mail server.  I used to change my e-mail address to a new domain every couple of years to stop the spam.  I obviously don't want to do that now, because I don't want my website domain changing.  Having boyung.com also makes it really easy for people to remember my e-mail address if they want to contact me.  The only problem is, this now leaves me very open to spam.  My wife and I were getting tons of spam on a daily basis.  Unfortunately, I was having a very hard time finding a reliable spam filter at the server level that wouldn't cost me an arm and a leg.  I couldn't find anything good that was purely software based for Exchange, either.  Most things that I found were hardware based solutions that filtered the mail before it got to the actual server.  I didn't want that because of cost and power consumption.

Eventually, I found Spam Assassin.  I had actually come across Spam Assassin several times before in my research, but I couldn't find an easy set of instructions (or any instructions really) on getting it running with Exchange.  I may be a computer guy, but I'm not a server guy, and I'm definitely not an Exchange/mail server guy.  In one of my many RSS feeds (sorry, I can't remember which one now) there was an article on using Spam Assassin on Windows.  This was exactly what I was looking for!  Software based, server level, high quality, learning spam filter that's cheap (free!).  I'm not going to put the instructions here, but I have put all of the necessary links below, which will guide you through the entire process.  There's no point in repeating the hard work that was done by Christopher Lewis and Michael Bell (and of course, everyone out there that worked on Spam Assassin itself).  I will say that Spam Assassin has worked out great for my spam problems.  I went from getting literally hundreds of spam e-mails each day to where I now get 1-2 that pass through freely, and another 5-10 that get marked as potential spam.  I had it running for about a week where I still got every message to make sure that it wasn't coming up with false positives, but there was not a single e-mail marked as spam that shouldn't have been.  Pretty good track record, if you ask me.  It's been running now for over a month, and I don't have a single complaint.

If you have your own mail server, Windows, Linux, or anything else that can run it, I highly recommend Spam Assassin for all of your spam fighting needs.

 Links

Spam Assassin Download Page

Exchange Spam Assassin SMTP Sink by Christopher Lewis

Instructions on using Spam Assassin on Windows by Michael Bell