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Next, you should join the spamassassin-users mailing list (if you're not already a member), and post the test rules to that list, and ask others to check against their corpora. List members often will also suggest improvements to the tests.

Wiki MarkupMost importantly, you should create a new "bug" entry with the suggested rules in the \[http://bugzilla.spamassassin.org SpamAssassin bugzilla\]. This will ensure that the developers will actually see the rules (while the developers participate in the list, it's easy for these suggestions to get lost in the noise). You should attach 1 or more sample spam messages (with all headers intact, please!) as attachments, too, so we can see an example of what the rule is intended to catch.

From that point on, the SpamAssassin developers handle things. They may ask you some questions or request a contributor license agreement if the contribution requires it, and hopefully, your new rules will be added to the source code repository for testing, and if they work well, are likely to be included in future released versions.

Are there any other places I can contribute my rules?

There are some external projects that maintain their own rule sets, but these are not part of the Apache SpamAssassin project so while rules posted there will possibly be used by some advanced users, the entire user community will not have access to them. Note that they are unable to contribute rules to Apache since the original author must make the contribution.

• the http://www.exit0.us Wiki
• the SARE forums at http://www.rulesemporium.com/forums/
  

Similar to spamassassin-users, participants on both of these forums will test promising rules.

CategoryFaqIf your rules don't get added to the default SpamAssassin set, it may be useful to add them to CustomRulesets.