On Monday 19 October 2009, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: >amadis wrote: >> I usually think of myself as pretty capable with a computer but >> Spamassassin and it's website have made me think twice. I took me 20 >> minutes just to figure out where this forum was. I feel like Apache is >> trying to weed out dunderheads like me from using their product. I swear >> I cannot understand 80% of what is written on the how to install page. >> I've spent three hours now trying to install this program and cannot >> imagine that this was written for anyone but a computer programmer. I've >> searched the internet for help elsewhere and every conversation sounds >> like a foreign language. How is this user-friendly? I'd really like to >> support OpenSource but I swear if someone doesn't show me a SIMPLE way to >> work this, I'm dumping SA and Thunderbird and going back to Outlook. > >Are you running a mail server? SpamAssassin is a tool intended to be >used by people who build mailservers that are used at ISPs and >companies. It's not intended to be used by end-users for a single >mailbox - although if you had the right kind of account at an ISP >you could do that - most people would not. > I wonder where that got started? I have experience with 5 ISP's over the years, and currently have accounts with two majors plus the tv station where I was the CE for almost 20 years, now retired. I have never been refused access via a pop3 fetcher such as fetchmail by any of them as long as my scripts had the passwd and crypt protocols set correctly. I pop all 3 of them every 90 seconds on a dsl circuit. Fetchmail hands it off to procmail, procmail then /dev/nulls the known spammers, then hands it of to SA, and anything coming back with more than 4 stars again gets sent to /dev/null. It hands the rest to kmail, which sorts it into folders and hands it to me. As near total hands off once configured as it can be.
I would submit that the innate fear of a text editor to be used to configure this stuff is a much larger reason a lot of people use a webmailer at their ISP. The question then is how do we convince them its ok to set options in a text file instead of a web page controlled by the ISP, where you have to click past 3 web spams per message before you can actually see the message? >If you want to use SpamAssassin I would suggest you find an ISP in your >area that provides mailboxes that are scanned by SpamAssassin. And >by the way, Thunderbird has nothing to do with SpamAssassin, and people >can access SpamAssassin-protected mailboxes just fine with Outlook. > >Ted > -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) The NRA is offering FREE Associate memberships to anyone who wants them. <https://www.nrahq.org/nrabonus/accept-membership.asp> The fortune program is supported, in part, by user contributions and by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Inanities.
