How does SpamAssassin determine what is spam and what is not?
The SpamAssassin program analyzes each incoming email for a wide variety of characteristics that are common to spam messages. Things like keywords (Viagra, Mortgage, Enlargement, etc), graphical images, computer code, and invalid header information are each assigned a point value. SpamAssassin takes the point values for all the associated attributes and adds them for a composite “spaminess” rating. If that rating exceeds a given threshold, the message is marked as spam.
