Whitelisting subject lines

[shacker23]

If a weblog comment spam slips through installed filters and lands on a user's blog, the user can usually delete the comment manually. But ONLY if s/he knows it's there. When comments are posted on most blog systems, notification about the comment is emailed to the author of the original article.

But what I'm seeing lately is that some of these notification emails are themselves being caught by SpamAssasin. Result is that spam goes live on the owner's site and s/he never receives notification about it.

I thought the answer would be to just set up a SpamAssassin whitelist for part of the subject line, but it looks like cPanel doesn't allow this. Is there a way to do this manually, outside of cPanel?

Thanks,
Scot

 

[sparek-3]

I believe Whitelisting subjects is now included in SpamAssassin. I know previously it was an available plugin, which required some loading of some additional SpamAssasin modules, but I believe it is included in SpamAssassin by default now.

You may not be able to do this from the control panel interface, but you can edit your user_prefs file and whitelist subjects, as well as make other changes to your SpamAssassin configuration.

To whitelist a subject, you will need to edit the file at:

/home/user/.spamassassin/user_prefs

You will want to add to this file lines such as:

whitelist_subject Good Subject
whitelist_subject Another Good Subject

You can add as many as you like, each just needs to be on its own separate line.

More information concerning this (though some of this information may be outdated, but the concept still applies) at:

http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/WhiteListSubjectPlugin

Hope this helps.

 

[shacker23]

Brilliant - Thanks sparek. Giving it a shot now. If this works, I'll log it as a feature request in bugzilla (or rather log a request to expose this in the UI).