After a few hours of

After a few hours of tweaking (and losing email, if I don't get back to something you sent in the last 24hrs, feel free to resend), I have finally got SpamAssassin up and running to filter my email. From the past couple day's worth of messages, it has caught every spam, and the one false positive it found out of about 200 messages was for something I didn't want to receive anyway.

I first heard about spamassassin from Bill Rini's review, and my experiences with it mirror his. It tags spam with a special header and rewrites the subject, making it easy to filter tagged mail into a spam folder, and the remainder of all your email comes through clean. It is incredibly liberating to be able to read new email free of junk, though it sucks that the spam situation is such that people have to write applications like this.