How do I get MailScanner to pass Spamassassin Headers through ?

[David H. Lynch Jr.]

        Apparently I had the always include Spamassassin header option
turned on.

        I can probably live with filtering based on the presence or
absence of the X-Mailscanner-spamcheck: header.

        Modifying the subject is a non-starter. I guess there are places
in the world that do so, not only do my users get POed if the easily
visible parts of an e-mail get modified, but pretty much all e-mail
users I know get ticked if you modify their messages. Headers that they
do not ordinarily see do not count, but any of the fields that are
ordinarily visible or the body of the message are out of bounds. I
nearly had a revolt when we first installed Spamassassin. I am not sure
whether the report was in the body, or the subject line or possible some
of both, but no one was happy.

        In my dream world I still think I would like to see the
Spamassassin report headers optionally left in the message if that is
the way I choose to setup MailScanner.

        Thank You, at least I have a workable answer.



-----Original Message-----
From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On
Behalf Of Julian Field
Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2002 12:32 PM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: How do I get MailScanner to pass Spamassassin Headers
through ?


At 13:44 07/08/2002, you wrote:
>     I am using Exim and Spamassassin under Debian, with Outlook
clients.
>      Prior to adding MailScanner - which I am mostly happy with, to
>the  mix, I had Spamassassin setup to add its report to the message
>headers as
> below:
>   X-Spam-Status: Yes, hits=11 required=5
> tests=NO_REAL_NAME,FROM_ENDS_IN_NUM
> S,EXCUSE_15,REMOVE_PAGE,THIS_AINT_SPAM,RCVD_IN_OSIRUSOFT_COM
>X-Spam-Flag: YES
>X-Spam-Prev-Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
>
>     I do not believe I have changed my Spamassassin configuration but
>now  I only get what basically is a digested version of this from
>MailScanner.  I am particularly interested in the header
>X-Xpam-Flag: YES

If you enable "Use SpamAssassin = yes" in mailscanner.conf, then you
will get an "X-MailScanner-SpamCheck" header if it spam. If SpamAssassin
is what made MailScanner think the message was spam, then you will get
the report containing the list of successful tests in that header. You
will not get the header unless it is spam (unless you force it to always
include the SpamAssassin header).

To make the filtering process in Outlook even easier, MailScanner will
add "{SPAM?}" at the start of the subject line if MailScanner thought it
was spam. So your clients don't even have to work out how to filter on
the presence of an arbitrary header, they just have to filter on
"{SPAM?}" appearing in the subject line, which the Outlook/Eudora
filtering wizards make very simple.

You can of course change the "{SPAM?}" text to anything you like, and
you can rename the "X-MailScanner-SpamCheck" header as well.

>
>     Outlook is not particularly good at parsing headers to make
> filtering decisions. I would love to be dealing with better
> capabilities, but the clients I have use outlook and will likely for
> some time to come. In the meantime, we do not block any suspected SPAM

> (alright we do block some ridiculously high scorers), for the most
> part we leave it up to the recipient to implement filters based on the

> headers that Spamassassin adds. the presence or absence of a simple
> header with a yes or no value is inside Outlooks limited filtering
> capability. If numeric comparisons are then I am not as well versed
> with outlook as I thought.
>
>     Anyway, do I have something in MailScanner configured wrong ? Is
> there some way to keep it from stripping out the Spamassassin headers
> ? I checked the past couple months of mailing list archives and while
> I did not read every messages, I read anything that looked like it
> might have some bearing. I learned allot, but not the answer I am
> looking for.
>
>     Thank you.

--
Julian Field                Teaching Systems Manager
jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk         Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science
Tel. 023 8059 2817          University of Southampton
                             Southampton SO17 1BJ