How To Install spamassassin on Ubuntu

Posted on April 1, 2023  (Last modified on May 20, 2023 )

2 minutes  • 425 words

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install spamassassin on Ubuntu.

What is spamassassin

spamassassin is:

SpamAssassin is a very powerful and fully configurable spam filter with numerous features including automatic white-listing, RBL testing, Bayesian analysis, header and body text analysis. It is designed to be called from a user’s .procmail or .forward file, but can also be integrated into a Mail Transport Agent (MTA).

Included in this package is a daemonized form of spamassassin (spamd) which communicates with its client (spamc) via TCP, to reduce the overhead of loading perl with each message. To take advantage of this, you must install the spamc package.

There are three methods to install spamassassin on Ubuntu. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.

Install spamassassin Using apt-get

Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt database, We can install spamassassin using apt-get by running the following command:

sudo apt-get -y install spamassassin

Install spamassassin Using apt

Update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, We can install spamassassin using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install spamassassin

Install spamassassin Using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Ubuntu. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating apt database, We can install spamassassin using aptitude by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install spamassassin

How To Uninstall spamassassin on Ubuntu

To uninstall only the spamassassin package we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove spamassassin

Uninstall spamassassin And Its Dependencies

To uninstall spamassassin and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Ubuntu, we can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove spamassassin

Remove spamassassin Configurations and Data

To remove spamassassin configuration and data from Ubuntu we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y purge spamassassin

Remove spamassassin configuration, data, and all of its dependencies

We can use the following command to remove spamassassin configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge spamassassin

Dependencies

spamassassin have the following dependencies:

• perl
• libhtml-parser-perl
• libsocket6-perl
• adduser
• libsys-hostname-long-perl
• libarchive-tar-perl
• libnet-dns-perl
• libnetaddr-ip-perl
• libhttp-date-perl
• libmail-dkim-perl
• lsb-base
• libwww-perl
• init-system-helpers

References

• spamassassin website

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install spamassassin package on Ubuntu using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.