A friend suggested I try out the SURBL, a DNS based blacklist of URLs that appear in spam messages. The theory is that most spam is trying to pitch something via a website, so if you keep track of the websites, you’ll have a good idea if the message is spam by checking the urls in the message.

Checking their web page, there were two methods of installing it, the easiest being to use SpamAssassin 3.0.0. Lazy as I am, I upgraded:

# cpan

...

cpan> install Mail::SpamAssassin

I added a couple of lines to my user_prefs file, and all was well. Well, not everything. I had to turn off the auto whitelist I was using before, since it’s on by default and doesn’t seem to like me specifying it. I also had to delete my Bayesian filter files, since the database version seems to have changed.

In the morning, I thought something was wrong with my mail. The only thing “wrong” was that there was no spam! SpamAssassin has always done a good job of separating the good from the bad, but this latest upgrade is a huge jump.