Thanks for trying, Martin, but that's way over my head. I'm a new user
of Linux (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, about 3-4 months), and I've been using
Thunderbird for several years. I looked at installing Spam Assassin on
my system but it was too in-depth for me.

Dan
5J

On 4/7/21 4:44 PM, Martin Gregorie wrote:
On Wed, 07 Apr 2021 15:05:51 -0600, Dan Marotta wrote:

I've been using the Brave browser for the past 3-4 months. I just
opened a new tab and was told that 65,786 trackers and ads have been
blocked. I still get a lot of spam; how it gets past my spam blocker, I
don't know, but I'm going to have a look at spam assassin.

What does your mail chain look like? I ask because Spamassassin is
probably not a good fit if you're just running a mail reader on a Windows
system. On the other hand, your ISP may be running Spamassassin and
filtering out obvious spam, i.e. mail from a known spammer (there are
lists of these...).

SA is designed to handle quite high mail volumes and is usually put into
the path messages follow through a mail server, something like this:

|-- mail reader
ISP --mail in--Mail server --|-- mail reader
| Y |-- mail reader
| |
| +-- spam - quarantine
| |
V ^
Spamassassin

All SA does is to inspect an email and assign it a score by applying a
set of rules to its content. The filter looks at the spam score and
conventionally says anything with a score of less than 5 is ham and
anything over 5 is spam. The filter is separate because everybody has
different ideas of what to do with spam: some bin spam, others block spam
senders, while others treat it as undeliverable mail and return it to the
sender.

My filter puts spam in quarantine for a week and sends me a daily report
of any new spam so I can look at it in case it was misclassified as spam.
In this case I can fish it out of quarantine before it gets deleted.

Other people, who are usually UNIX or Linux users simply pass everything
to their user's mailreaders. These use a program, procmail, to look at
the spam score and use that to decide whether the message is shown to the
user or binned. This is useful in a business where different folks get
different mail streams and have differing spam tolerances.

Sorry about the length of that, but mail handling can be quite complex
and its not necessary to understand much of this stuff unless you run
your own mail server - and nobody who just uses an Apple or Windows PC,
iPad or phone will be running a mail server.

I hope its useful info.