ALTERNATIVES TO SPAMASSASSIN CODE

To diagnose between the two, add the above GTUBE test string to a test message (copy a real message and include that string in the body) and then try running your code again. Here is the GTUBE test string: XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-UBE-TEST-EMAIL*C.34X There are two possibilities: You have an invocation problem (SpamAssassin does not run properly or you are not properly extracting the verdict) or you have an efficacy problem (SpamAssassin runs but does not have the desired accuracy, in this case, a false negative problem). Keep in mind that I wrote it assuming you've got real rfc5322 (originally rfc822) email. If you really really want to use SpamAssassin, read the rest of this answer. If it's an ongoing effort, correct its mistakes as you find them and it should improve to something usable over time. If you have a large enough collection of messages, you can train a Bayesian based filter on a subset and then run it on the rest.

You're far better off using some content-only spam filter. (Also note that many online indices are tuned for live lookups and therefore expire older entries, so if you scan a spam from a few days ago, it might no longer have an entry even if it once did.) So too can the URI DNSBLs, but the other lookups (Razor2, Pyzor, all DNSBLs) are useless, as are 99% or so of the regex rule signatures. Sure, the Bayesian mechanism can conceivably help, though again it is composed with headers and email-specific tokenization techniques. This is pretty much the only metadata available in twitter, so SpamAssassin has nothing to go on but the tweet ('body') content itself. The best spam-fighting techniques I've seen for twitter, which are mostly academic research rather than usable code, involve intense link graphs that track followers and build reputations for each user. Specifically, SpamAssassin is designed to scan email, complete with rich metadata from the headers. The 'I'm downloading my twitter feed and saving them into text files' piece is key.

I wrote a response (below) not having noted how you started this question. There is a file called ~/.spamassassin/user_prefs in my home directory but i didn't touch it I didn't configure spamAssasin I simply started using the perl module My $mail = $status = $spamtest->check($mail) My $spamtest = Mail::SpamAssassin->new()

Is there a better alternative for my project?.

Do My messages need to be in a cetain format?.

Do I have to configure Spamasssasin files?.

All my messages keep getting marked as 'not spam' in my if statement even the ones that are 419 scams. So I followed this post about loading messages from text. I'm downloading my twitter feed and saving them into text files and I want to check the likely hood of spam using a perl script with Mail::SpamAssassin.

Alternatives to spamassassin