Sane Spam Strategy

Question

Right now I'm using spamd to score spam and then procmail to put it in user's .Spam Maildir folder and then manually running sa-learn on .LearnAsSpam and .LearnAsHam and then also manually just deleting everything in those folders. Clearly there must be a better way and I just don't know what it is.

Is there a better spam tool chain that handles these details?

Did you read [Fighting Spam - What can I do as an: Email Administrator, Domain Owner, or User?](http://serverfault.com/q/419407/126632) — Michael Hampton, Jun 06 '15 at 16:49
That's a great read. I will study it intently. But it doesn't really address the specific question which is wrt post processing of spam. But now I'm wondering if I can leverage some of these other techniques and actually not use Bayes at all. Although I would still need to device a method of deleting old spam. — squarewav, Jun 06 '15 at 17:30
After all the other stuff, I don't get enough spam incoming for SpamAssassin to do much of anything useful. :) — Michael Hampton, Jun 06 '15 at 17:32

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 07 '15 at 09:46

I've used the next approach:

MTA is the exim that pass the copy of message to the spamassassin from the DATA ACL. SA returns the score and do not perform any message modifications or routing. If calculated score is above the threshold, exim add some special header (X-Spam-Detected: YES) to the message.

Then message is routed for local delivery via dovecot's deliver. Dovecot have pidgeonhole plugin installed that is the sieve engine implementation. When message satisfy some conditions (f.e. header "X-Spam-Detected" exists) pidgeonhole store the message in the inbox' subfolder:

if exists "X-Spam-Detected"
{
   fileinto "Junk";
   stop;
}

If message is detected wrong (false-positive or false-negative) user can move the message to the right place. Dovecot have another plugin called antispam that track message movements. When message is moved TO the "Spam" subfolder, automatically sa-learn --spam is launched for that message. When message is moved FROM the "Spam" subfolder, sa-learn --ham is launched.

Old messages can be removed automatically with doveadm utility:

doveadm expunge -A mailbox Junk  savedbefore 31d

Sane Spam Strategy

1 Answers1