Spamassasin Config

[Quentin Campbell]

Mark

Add some local SpamAssassin rules into /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf
and set the scores to appropriately high values.

You will need to be a bit clever about the pattern matching you do when
looking for the strings you want to detect. Otherwise you will generate
false positives.

If you want some example rules to work from look at the full set of
rules under /usr/share/spamassassin.

I have added about 160 local rules at this site to tune the way
SpamAssasin works. The local overide rules and scores are in
/etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf. As well as the rules described above
this file also includes local overides such as for "required_hits"
(which we have set at 9) and for disabling blacklisting by SA.

If you maintain local rules in the way recommended by the SpamAssassin
docs, and described above, BEWARE of the "spam.assassin.prefs.conf" file
provided by MailScanner. This file will overide any other local changes
to SpamAssassin that you have made in the places recommended by the
SpamAssassin docs.

In our case the "spam.assassin.prefs.conf" file should be empty OR all
lines should be comments OR the "SpamAssassin Pref File =" entry in
mailscanner.conf should be null OR should point at (for this site)
"/etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf".

One final point. Although this will be obvious to most, I do my testing
of changes to local SpamAssassin rules as a non-root user and by using
"spamassassin -t" for applying the new rules aginst test messages. The
rules file for development are in the file
~myloginid/.spamassassin/user_prefs.

This way the rules I am developing are not seen by the production
MailScanner/ SpamAssassin which runs as root. However note that when
doing the testing as the non-root user the local rules in
/etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf need to be visible to "spamassassin -t".
Make sure that the "local.cf" file is "read" to everyone for this to be
the case. 

Quentin
---
PHONE: +44 191 222 8209    Computing Service, University of Newcastle
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Any opinion expressed above is mine. The University can get its own." 
-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Tavares [mailto:info at pro-invest.ca] 
Sent: 17 September 2002 15:39
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Spamassasin Config


Hello,

I know, I know this isn't a spamassasin mailing however we are using
mailscanner and spamassasin so I figured I could gleam off the knowledge
of 50 million users world wide.

enough fluff...

Is there a way to stop any and all mailings that come to our server with
any sexual slant whatsoever without relying on a hit count from
spamassasin? We have set our max hit count from 20 to 15 and that has
helped however we would like to prevent any mail with PORN, RAPE...etc
from reaching our users period.

Thanks,

Mark