About the Author

Alistair McDonald is the founder and Managing Director of InRevo Ltd, an IT consultancy based in Berkshire, UK. He worked for several large corporations before founding InRevo in 1994. The company offers security, email, and other IT consultancy, as well as bespoke development.

Alistair is a developer specializing in C++ and Perl. When first introduced to Perl, he described it as "a whole new level of flexibility". Alistair got involved with the role of email administrator for one of InRevo’s clients, and subsequently honed his skills setting up servers for InRevo.

Alistair lists his favorite open-source projects as GNU Emacs, the Linux kernel, the Gentoo Linux distribution, the Perl language, SpamAssassin, and Postfix. He is also a big fan of xplanet and xscreensaver for eye candy.

Alistair is very much a family man, and enjoys spending time with his wife and two children in and around Berkshire, where they have lived for the past ten years.

I can recall getting my first spam email. This was in the mid nineties, when CompuServe provided Internet email addresses for the first time. I had heard of spam, but not experienced it. Strangely, that first spam made me feel that I’d come of age in the Internet, but the second, third and fourth spams soon made me realize what an inconvenience spam was. Back then, I did not realize how much spam would affect the Internet, and how much effort would be put into solving it. I guarded future email addresses until I started using SpamAssassin.

I hope that this book assists fellow system administrators to install and configure SpamAssassin. It really is a great solution to spam and takes very little time to set up.

Writing this book has not been a solo effort, and several people deserve special mentions.

First, my wife Louise, who has put in many long nights critically examining drafts and improving my use of English, while single-handedly bringing up two very lively children. Despite her attempts to eradicate all commas from the text, one or two may remain.

Several friends and colleagues have commented on draft chapters and contributed ideas and inspiration. I would like to take this opportunity to thank them publicly for their efforts. They are: Paul Serjeant, Ian Haycox, Colin Jenkins, and Jamie O’Shaughnessey.

During the writing of this book, I had the misfortune to spend much of my time away from home. This was made bearable as much of the time was spent with my parents. I’d like to thank them for looking after me so well, and I’d also like to apologize for being such an appalling and antisocial house guest at times.

Of course, there are many more people to thank. All the SpamAssassin developers, past and present, should be congratulated for creating such an effective tool. Their work is based on the many developers of the Perl language, another great free software project. Hats off to all of you for your hard work and ingenuity.

Finally, a big thank you to the Trade Router team, for all their inspirational comments. Keep having five a day!

I wrote this book on a Dell laptop running Gentoo Linux. I used vmware to install a total of seven different virtual machines for testing—four separate Gentoo configurations for Sendmail, Postfix, Exim, and Gmail, a Windows 2000 installation, a RedHat 9 installation, and a Debian installation, installed from the wonderful Knoppix CD.

This book is dedicated to my children, Imogen and Keir— So lively during the day, and so peaceful at night.