Filtering Foreign Language Spam

                 Not everything I don't understand is spam. Most of the things don't understand are not. But when the majority of the email in a language I can read is junk, the spam percentage is even higher for mail using charsets that make my computer pause (and, obviously, look for them in hidden corners of the disk).

By default, SpamAssassin treats all languages equally. But you can configure it to parse each message and determine the language used. If it is not one of the "allowed" languages, SpamAssassin automatically adds a few points the message's spam score. If SpamAssassin is not sure about the language used, no points are assigned.

Filter Foreign Language Spam with SpamAssassin

Steps to have SpamAssassin filter out mail in foreign tongues:

•     Open /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf in your favorite editor.

•     If not present, add "ok_languages " on a line of itself.

•     List the languages (from the list below) you want to accept, separated by spaces:

        af - Afrikaans
        sq - Albanian
        am - Amharic
        ar - Arabic
        hy - Armenian
        eu - Basque
        bs - Bosnian
        bg - Bulgarian
        be - Belorussian
        ca - Catalan
        zh - Chinese
        hr - Croatian
        cs - Czech
        da - Danish
        nl - Dutch
        en - English
        eo - Esperanto
        et - Estonian
        fi - Finnish
        fr - French
        fy - Frisian
        ka - Georgian
        de - German
        el - Greek
        he - Hebrew
        hu - Hungarian
        hi - Hindi
        is - Icelandic
        id - Indonesian
        ga - Irish Gaelic
        it - Italian
        ja - Japanese
        ko - Korean
        la - Latin
        lv - Latvian
        lt - Lithuanian
        ms - Malay
        mr - Marathi
        ne - Nepali
        no - Norwegian
        fa - Persian
        pl - Polish
        pt - Portuguese
        qu - Quechua
        rm - Rhaeto-Romance
        ro - Romanian
        ru - Russian
        sa - Sanskrit
        sco - Scots
        gd - Scottish Gaelic
        sr - Serbian
        sk - Slovak
        sl - Slovenian
        es - Spanish
        sw - Swahili
        sv - Swedish
        tl - Tagalog
        ta - Tamil
        th - Thai
        tr - Turkish
        uk - Ukrainian
        vi - Vietnamese
        cy - Welsh
        yi - Yiddish

To accept mail in English, German, Latin, Thai and Swedish, for example, use "ok_languages en de la th sv".