Frequently Asked Questions

SpamAssassin doesn't automatically integrate into existing mail application. It acts as a service to which mails can be passed in order to be scanned for spam signs. The interaction between your mail client / mail transfer agent and SpamAssassin must be provided by some other mechanism.

You will need an external application to create a wrapper for spamd.exe that can be used as a Windows service. With "SpamAssassin in a Box" we provide an advanced Windows service, that is aligned to particular SpamAssassin requirements (automatic rule updates, periodical restarts and many more). If you need enhanced functionality like that of a mail router or POP3 connector, please have a look at our products "SmartPOP2Exchange" and "Exchange Server Toolbox", which contain the specialized SpamAssassin service as well.

The SpamAssassin Bayes filter can be trained either by using the sa-learn.exe or the spamc.exe. The main difference on a Windows system is that sa-learn will run under the current user credentials while spamc will pass the mails that shall be trained to spamd (the SpamAssassin Daemon) which then trains the mail under the user credentials of spamd. This is especially important if you run SpamD for spam filtering under a separate user account, e.g. the Windows system user account (which is the default when using SpamAssassin in a Box for example). In this case you have to use spamc for training, because using sa-learn would just train the Bayes database for the local user.
 
For manual training we provide a batch script which can be used to train messages in a specific folder either as spam or ham. Besides the directory where the messages that shall be learned reside, the script requires you to decide whether the messages shall be learned as spam or ham. Please note that messages must be conform to the RFC822 format in order to make the Bayes filter work properly. For converting an Outlook message into a RFC822 conform message there are several tools available, for example "MSG to EML Converter". The script tries to learn using spamc first - if that fails because there is no local spamd instance available, it will "fallback" to sa-learn (assuming that learning shall be done using the local user account). To use the batch script, please follow these steps:
 
1. Open a command line prompt (run > cmd.exe).
2. Change directory (cd) to the installation directory of SpamAssassin for Windows.
3. Execute command: trainbayes.bat
4. Follow the instructions of the batch script.

You'll find a lot of information on the official docs or SpamAssassin Wiki. As these pages are updated continuously you may prefer information provided there.

This is described in the topic "Components and Plugins".