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Comment: clean up page, separate documentation about Apache vs. non-Apache stuff

I've got some wonderful new rules that would help classify mail messages! How do I contribute them to Apache SpamAssassin?

Ideally you will have tested your rules against your own sets of (hand-checked) spam and non-spam messages to be sure they do a good job of identifying messages correctly. This doesnRules don't need to be 100% accurate - but does need to be fairly close to 100%, but rules should be at least 95% accurate.

Not checking the rules against non-spam is a very bad idea; we've often found that rules that seemed like a great idea, accidentally hit a lot of non-spam in ways we hadn't foreseen.

Next, you should join the spamassassin-users mailing list (if you're not already a member), and post the test rules to that list, and ask others to check against their corpora. List members often will also suggest improvements to the tests.

Wiki Markup
Most importantly, you
MUST create an entry with the suggested rules in the SpamAssassin "bugzilla" system. This will ensure that the developers will actually see the rules (while the developers participate in the list, it's easy for these suggestions to get lost in the noise). You should attach 1 or more sample spam messages (with all headers intact, please!) as attachments, too, so we can see what the rule is intending to catch.
 should create a new "bug" entry with the suggested rules in the \[http://bugzilla.spamassassin.org SpamAssassin bugzilla\]. This will ensure that the developers will actually see the rules (while the developers participate in the list, it's easy for these suggestions to get lost in the noise). You should attach 1 or more sample spam messages (with all headers intact, please!) as attachments, too, so we can see an example of what the rule is intended to catch.

From that point on, the SpamAssassin developers handle things. They may ask you some questions or request a contributor license agreement if the contribution requires it, and hopefully, your new rules will be added to the source code New rules are added to the SVN (development) repository for testing, and if they work well, are likely to be included in future released versions. You might also post your SpamAssassinRules to

Are there any other places I can contribute my rules?

There are some external projects that maintain their own rule sets, but these are not part of the Apache SpamAssassin project so while rules posted there will possibly be used by some advanced users, the entire user community will not have access to them. Note that they are unable to contribute rules to Apache since the original author must make the contribution.

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Similar to spamassassin-users, participants on both of these forums – SARE will test rules that seem promising , and can often incorporate viable rules into their custom files faster than such rules get added to the distribution set. (this really needs to mention that rules contributed to SARE don't generally make it into SpamAssassin proper and that SpamAssassin can't take rules contributed indirectly (we need permission from the author))