I've had a spam problem on my Slackware box for a while now that I didn't want to take the time to address. Junk is starting to accumulate in my trash folder and I'd like to filter the 4000+ messages for spam. I use Sylpheed (not Claws) for email and see that it is able to filter emails. I cannot seem to find a filter rule that would include all the junk messages since certain words are mispelled and the sender varies. Any suggestions of how to write a filter rule for ever changing spam?

i don't know much about slackware but, I use mozilla and I am very happy with my spam filter. hope this helps.

It takes a very short time for the spam filter to be be trained in Thunderbird 1.5.0.7. TB gets rid of most of my spam quite nicely:-)

The way you guys seem to do it is let the client take care of it.... how about using a server like aproach?

What I do is this:
- Fetchmail retrieves mail form my ISPs and hands it to sendmail for local delivery
- Sendmail makes sure the mail gets scanned by SpamAssassin. Used to do this via procmail, but use milter nowadays (had to because of upgrading IMAP to the cyrus version)
- Clients connect via inetd to WU (or UW) IMAPD to retrieve mail from the local system.

This way I have my own IMAP sever to which I can connect from virtually any host (including localhost) and the mail is scanned on the server. Other advantages:
- all my mail is on one system... not scattered on IMAP account at the different ISPs or (horror) pop clients on different systems I use.
- you can use server side tools like procmail (or sieve) to have the email stored in different folders on the IMAP server, not having to do that with every client you use on every host you use.

Because I use Windows systems to connect as wel I even scan for virusses with ClamAV

But that is just me...

I found bogofilter which integrates nicely with sylpheed. Just make a spam folder in sylpheed, enable bogofilter in configuration>junk mail (specify that all junk mail goes to your spam folder), and then right click on emails received and click set as junk or set not as junk to make a rules file (the rules file is in ~/.bogofilter/FILE.db). I went into my trash folder and did this for the last 2 years worth of emails and it works well now on new emails.

I have bogofilter working with Sylpheed 2.2.9 in Fedora Core 6 and Slackware 11.

here is the link: http://bogofilter.sourceforge.net/