Details
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Bug
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Status: Open
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Major
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Resolution: Unresolved
Description
SpamAssassin is a computationally expensive process to run. It is more costly as emails get larger.
So SA has safety valves to prevent excessive usage and DoS by limiting the maximum size of emails processed.
Spammers sometimes try and get around this with short messages and large attachments to bypass scanning.
There are techniques that exist to truncate emails that are sometimes less effective so this task would be to identify better techniques in order such as:
For example:
- remove attachments for scanning
- Check size and scan if small enough
- Truncate the message after closing any open tags
- scan
Apache SpamAssassin is a mail filter to identify spam. It is an intelligent email filter which uses a diverse range of tests to identify unsolicited bulk email, more commonly known as Spam. These tests are applied to email headers and content to classify email using advanced statistical methods.
In addition, SpamAssassin has a modular architecture that allows other technologies to be quickly wielded against spam and is designed for easy integration into virtually any email system.
It is primarily written in Perl with a few bits in C and shell scripts for system integration.
The compendium at https://raptor.pccc.com/raptor.cgim?template=email_spam_compendium is helpful to understand some of the concepts with SpamAssassin
It will be helpful for a student in this project to understand SMTP but a willingness to learn and setup your own mail server on a Linux Distribution with SpamAssassin for a personal test domain will be very desired with assistance provided to get the basic framework for a sandbox for learning.
As email becomes more commodotized by major providers, knowledge of email systems and their security is dwindling. This opportunity can provide real-world experience with an email security product that is employed by countless commercial systems in the world.