Exim/Spamassin Reject above X score?

[picoyak]

Being a long-time Sendmail user, I've always piped mail through spamass-milter to be examined. With the milter, I could set two thresholds for SA -- one to be marked as spam, and another to be rejected.

For instance, I like to mark as spam when the score is >= 4.0, and reject when the score is >= 12.0

Is there any way to accomplish this with my current Mailscanner/Exim/SA setup?

TIA for any advice!

[charlie]

To Mark at 4 and Discard at 12

Set the Spam Assassin Config file
required_hits 4.0

Set the Cpanel E-Mail Filter to
$message_headers contains "X-Spam-Level: ************" Discard
The number of ***,s is the 'score' you want to discard at.

[n1zyy]

Originally Posted by charlie

Set the Cpanel E-Mail Filter to
$message_headers contains "X-Spam-Level: ************" Discard
The number of ***,s is the 'score' you want to discard at.

I'm not sure if this is what picoyak is looking for, but in some views, there's a big difference between discarding mail and rejecting it. Discarding sends the message that the account's active, and just ignoring spam, whereas if it bounces back, some spammers might remove it.

Although you could change it to "forward" to :fail: I believe?

[chirpy]

whereas if it bounces back, some spammers might remove it.

No, they won't, once you're on a spam list, you'll stay there. You should never bounce it - it creates more email traffic and nearly always goes to an innocent party.

[picoyak]

Ah yeah thanks all. I actually did finally find options in Mailscanner.conf. How I missed them the first zillion times scrolling through that file, I dunno. Anyway, a comibination of the following allows me delete.

High SpamAssassin Score = 12
High Scoring Spam Actions = delete

I considered notify for about 0.5 seconds before just deciding to delete the stupid things. It's only mail for my personal domains and if it scores a 12 then in my book it's rubbish

Thank all for the feedback!

[picoyak]

Ok. I must have been wrong

with the settings above, it seems there's some disconnect someplace, as today I finally received a mail scoring 19.1. It was marked as [SPAM], which is the mark chosen via cpanel for the specific site. Whereas I'm guessing if Mailscanner were actually controlling SA server-wide scoring and headers, then the default {spam?} tag would be used.

There seems to be some disconnect there with spamassassin and mailscanner? Everything works pretty well -- virus scanning and spam scoring, and of course delivery. But at exactly what point spam scoring/handling leaves Mailscanner moves over to each domains .spamassasin/user_prefs is escaping me.

I know... there's something I'm not seeing here. Any ideas?

Oh yeah, and just to clarify, my goal is to delete high-scoring spam, not reject it.

[chirpy]

The concept of Spam and High Scoring Spam is a MailScanner thing and has nothing to do with SpamAssassin (other than SA provides the scores). You can only have different actions if you use SA through MailScanner and completely disable SA in WHM and cPanel. It doesn't work with a mix of the two.

[charlie]

An update to my previous post.
The method of using the Spam Assassin tags and the Cpanel E-mail filters to Mark at one level and discard at another WON'T work if you are using the Cpanel Default E-mail Account.

You must create a POP account and use Cpanel to make the POP account the default to work.