A question about spam?

[Tim Chase]

On December 18, 2016, Karen Lewellen wrote:
> We have Spam assassin here, and I do run sa-learn.
> However, I do not run this on addresses that use real names, even
> if I know the material is spam.
> At what level do programs like spam assassin do the filtering?  Are
> there other steps I can take to curb the flow?

SpamAssassin (SA) takes the content into consideration, so even if
you're receiving spam from known-good addresses, feed it to SA.  It
will learn from the content, not just the sender.

Depending on how your mail-server is configured, you can also set up
catch-all accounts and then direct various sources to custom email
addresses.  Because I own our domain, I can have all mail to this
list come to blinux.list@<mydomain> which lets me set up filters to
the effect "if anything comes to blinux.list@ and isn't also either
to the mailing-list or in my personal address-book of people with
whom I've previously sent messages, treat it as junk"

You can do something similar with GMail which allows you to take your
username at gmail.com and append a plus-sign and a tag for filtering
such as "username+blinux at gmail.com".

Not knowing the peculiars of your particular mail configuration, it's
hard to offer better suggestions, but at least you now know enough to
train SA with the junk mails even if they come from known-good
addresses.

-tim