Page History

Can you please fix SpamAssassin to not block mail we send?

Your My company doesn't send spam but our email , but you are being told by your customers and business partners that mail you send them is being blocked . Can you please fix SpamAssassin to not block our mail?This page is to be completed as a FAQby SpamAssassin. You are about to send the SpamAssassin development team an email request or you are about to file a bug report asking us to fix SpamAssassin to not block mail sent by your company.

Please read this FAQ all the way through first. It will be much more useful to you than that email or bug report.

SpamAssassin has nothing in it that blocks your mail specifically, nor does it have anything in it that we would adjust to allow your mail through specifically. SpamAssassin is software that ISPs and organizations that manage their own email services can install and configure to catch spam. If SpamAssassin at some sites is labeling your mail as spam, there is nothing we can do (unless you have found a bug in SpamAssassin - more on that below). But there are some things that you can do:

• Any particular person you communicate with who has your email marked as spam (or even worse, whose ISP blocks mail based on a SpamAssassin score, which we do not recommend be done) can add your email address to their SpamAssassin whitelist. You can suggest that to them and their ISP could tell them how. Note that there is no global whitelist.
• Of course that doesn't solve your problem. You don't want your email marked as spam in the first place. For a much longer article on things you can do to prevent email you send from being flagged as spam see AvoidingFpsForSenders.
• If that article is over your head, find anyone with Unix or Linux sysadmin experience who understands basic email administration and working with open source software like SpamAssassin. Ask them to read over that page and to look at examples of your email that has been filtered through SpamAssassin. To such a person the labeling added by SpamAssassin to the email will point to exactly what you can do to fix the problem.
• Finally, it is possible that you have encountered a bug in SpamAssassin that we do need to fix. Perhaps your company domain name which means "Great Value Foods" in your language happens to include a common misspelling in English of the most popular illegal pharmaceutical that is being spamvertised at the moment. Or perhaps you recently upgraded to the newest version of some popular mail software and it is triggering a bug in SpamAssassin. If you or that sysadmin person you have solicited to help you finds something specific like that, then please ask for help on the users mailing list (see AskingQuestions), and if you confirm that it is a bug please let us know by filing a detailed and specific bug report so we can fix it (see ReportingBugs).

Unless you are positive it is a bug, please ask for help on the users mailing list first, before filing a bug report. A bug report that consists of just "my mail is being blocked" will be closed as invalid and you'll be redirected to the users mailing list.

See also AvoidingFpsForSenders.