Spam filtering with cpanel-11.

Here is our story, story about spam and cpanel-11.

We were using cpanel-10 and were quite happy with it. But suddenly on several servers SpamAssassin started to fail too often. Then licenses got expired and we were forced to upgrade. This helped a lot - global spamassassin is a great feature, a lot more spam emails are being trapped. Unfortunately we had some "moments" and that's why I have started this thread to ask and discuss them.

1. SpamAssassin is using ACLs for spam scanning. We also are using DCC and SARE rules. Would that harm or disturb new way of operating? Since upgrade we do experience higher load and spamd/exim fails more frequently on _several_ (not all) servers.

2. In exim's configuration there are 2 similar options - how do they interfere with each other? Should we have them both enabled or is it enough with just one? Could fact of having them both enabled be the reason for higher load? These 2 options are:

- Reject mail at SMTP time if the spam score from spamassassin is greater than 10.0.
- Reject mail with a failure message if the spam score from spamassassin is greater than 20.0.

Yes, I think spam score of 10 or 12.5 is more than enough.

3. If incoming mail is being trapped as spam with high score and server refuses to accept it - will sender receive some notification or does it depend on sender's mail server?

4. If spamd and exim fails from time to time and there is nothing sensible in the logs - what could be done? Does it mean that server got too much job to do? Since upgrade our mail queue has improved dramatically - less than 100 emails - wow!

Thanks for your answers and sorry, if this is repeated discussion (although search function did not show anything more or less close to this).

Anton.

 

Thanks for the explanation, Mike. I guess I have to pay more attention to what is written and difference is quite obvious. And in last paragraph you probably wanted to say:

Reject Mail at SMTP Time

instead of:

Reject Mail With a Failure Message.

Once again thank you!

Regards,
Anton.