5. Gotchas

SpamAssassin isn't perfect. There's a chance that it will mark legitimate mail as spam, or not mark spam as such. Therefore it is highly recommended that you do NOT use procmail or your mail reader to automatically delete everything that SpamAssassin marks as spam. Instead, have procmail or your mail reader move everything marked as spam to a "Spam" folder, which you can then run through, glancing at from subject fields, and, the vast majority of the time, select all messages and delete. SpamAssassin assigns a score to each message, and each individual user can decide how low to set the threshhold that defines a message as spam. Obviously, the lower the threshhold, the more likely you are to have legit messages marked as spam, and the higher the threshhold, the more likely you are to have spam sneak through the filter.