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[Julian Field]

At 15:10 17/06/2002, you wrote:
>A 14:52 17/06/2002 +0100, Julian Field a écrit :
>>At 14:38 17/06/2002, you wrote:
>>>Can I get the "regular" SpamAssassin headers and comments ?
>>
>>No, not very easily. This involves really messing around with the message,
>>which slows everything down and confuses most users anyway.
>
>OK, but what about having at least the very useful header "X-Spam-Flag:
>YES|NO".

Then someone else asks for per-user and per-domain configuration of all 
this, and all of a sudden it's code-bloat time again :(

>IMHO it's easier to instruct the MUA to filter that boolean string rather
>than using the Subject: field {SPAM?} or the X-MailScanner-SpamCheck:
>header for "not spam".

I'm afraid I disagree there. Ever tried it with MS Outlook or Eudora? I 
don't doubt for a second that it can be done, but testing the Subject: line 
is something both of those packages expect a user to want to do.

And anyway, you've got the source so you can change it to do anything you 
like :) Just don't expect me to support it...

>>>One more question : before trying to use MailScanner / SpamAssassin, I had
>>>quite a lot of filtering rules (headers consistency, RBL, some virus
>>>signature checking, address ans domain lookups, etc...). I guess that I
>>>should disable them since MailScanner/SpamAssassin are doing pretty much
>>>the same job and as two sendmail are running all checks will be redundant.
>>>Am I right ?
>>
>>The only advantage of having sendmail do them is that it can reject the
>>message a lot "earlier" than MailScanner and SpamAssassin.
>
>OK, but on the other hand all the lookups will be made twice (the two
>sendmail instances) of not three times for some tests (RBL, ...). An option
>perhaps would be to add a third layer such smtpd to do some prefiltering
>that MailScanner/SpamAssassin can't do, or do slower. Do you agree ?

All sounds horribly complicated. Part of the core aims of MailScanner were 
that it should be easy to install. Setting up an entire smtpd just to do 
this would send half my users running for cover.

>One more note : your own default configuration is based on sophos. So why
>did you enable by default the external TNEF in the mailscanner.conf file ?
>Is there any reason to crosscheck ?

In general, people change the minimum amount possible from the 
configuration I supply. So I play it safe and enable the TNEF decoder. That 
way when people change Sophos to something else, there aren't any other 
options that have to be set separately to make it work.

Most people only change about 3 or 4 lines from the configuration I supply.
-- 
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