I’m starting to think that spamassassin is only for those who run their own mail server.
I have the daemon running but I have not ever seen it mark an email I receive in Thunderbird.
Can it work if i am only an end user and have no mail server other than my isp at comcast?
Thanks
I’m sure that general Spamassassin documentation describes many possible deployment scenarios.
http://spamassassin.apache.org/
Spamassassin can be installed on individual workstations or working with an email server.
TSU
So, if there is no mail server on the workstation how does it intercept the email coming from the isp to the email client like Thunderbird?
I don’t use Thunderbird, so I may be wrong, but I would think that you’d need to tell Thunderbird to use Spamassassin as it down loads emails. I’m sure there would be some sort of set up in preferences.
Unless, of course, Thunderbird has its own spam catcher built in that you’d need to set up.
Thunderbird can be told to honor spamassasin marked emails but I dont see anywhere in preferences that lets you tell Thunderbird to actually run spamasssin
Typically Spamassassin can be deployed both as a standalone and if someone creates it, as a plugin/addon.
Although I don’t use Thunderbird, Google Search suggests that a Spamassassin add-on has been written, so that’s likely the easiest way to integrate/configure your Thunderbird to use Spamassassin as a filter (more specifically a junk mail filter).
First the official mozilla documentation for Thunderbird which includes sections on Spamassassin
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Junk_Mail_Controls
A Thunderbird add-on tagged “Spamassassin” (The description is very brief, there’s no clue what it actually does and more)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/tag/spamassassin
A Wiki article on Thunderbird and Spamassassin
https://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/ReportingSpam
Which in turn points to a Thunderbird plugin last updated in 2013, so it’s likely unmaintained but of course may not be relevant to functionality
https://sourceforge.net/projects/soc2006spamd/
There are also numerous individual articles by various people describing in their own words how to set up Thunderbird with Spamassassin, you may want to follow one of those (recommend finding one written as recently as possible).
HTH,
TSU
I’m not sure but it could be scanning the typical email ports 143 for IMAP, 995 for POP3 and block suspected spam messages in the background from even being downloaded as tsu2 said you should see the spam assassin manual
on the other hand TBird has a build-in anti-spam database and it redirects suspected spam in a different folder, all webmail (google, Microsoft, yahoo, aol etc.) providers scan (semi successfully) for spam so I’m not really sure that an end user has a lot of benefit using this service.
I use Thunderbird’s built in spam service and it works pretty good. The more you train it the better it detects spam.