Email is one of the primary communication channels among users. The Radicati Group is an organization which publishes quantitative and qualitative research on business and consumer usage for email, instant messaging, social networking, wireless email, and unified communications. Their research estimates that the total worldwide emails in 2023 is over 360 billion.
The cost of spam is frightening, estimated to be approximately $50 billion each year. The tide of the daily spam is a continual thorn in the side for both providers and users. Spam is a waste of valuable network bandwidth, disk space and takes up users’ valuable time to declutter their mailboxes. Many spam messages contain URLs to a dubious website or websites, pushing fake pharmaceutical products, replicas, enhancers, or gambling. Alternatively, the URLs may be phishing attacks, for example taking an unwitting victim to a site which seeks to steal private information such as bank account login data.
There are a number of techniques that help fight the tide of spam. These include whitelisting, spam buckets, Bayesian filtering, fuzzy logic techniques, and attachment scanning.
To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 8 proficient open source Linux anti-spam solutions. We make the following recommendations captured in a legendary LinuxLinks-style chart. Only free and open source software is eligible for inclusion here.
Let’s explore the 8 email tools at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, together with links to relevant resources.
| Anti-Spam Tools | |
|---|---|
| SpamAssassin | Perl-based spam filter using text analysis |
| Proxmox Mail Gateway | Email security solution |
| Bogofilter | Mail filter that classifies mail as spam or ham (non-spam) |
| ASSP | Perl based transparent SMTP proxy server |
| Rspamd | Advanced spam filtering system |
| MailScanner | Virus scanner and spam detector |
| Pyzor | Spam-blocking networked system |
| Scrollout F1 | Highly configurable email gateway for multiple domains and servers |
This article has been updated to reflect the changes outlined in our recent announcement.
 Explore our carefully curated directory of recommended free and open source software, covering every major software category.The directory forms part of our extensive collection of articles for Linux enthusiasts. It includes hundreds of detailed reviews, together with free and open source alternatives to proprietary software from companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. LinuxLinks also covers interesting projects worth exploring, Linux-compatible hardware, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Know a useful free and open source Linux application that we haven’t covered? Tell us about it using our submission form. |
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