MailScanner & SpamAssassin

[John Rudd]

> From: Mack Ragan <ragan_davis at COLSTATE.EDU>
>
> However, I may be confused on the terminology.  The only thing I see in the
> header is something like this:
>
> X-MailScanner-SpamCheck: spam, SpamAssassin (score=12.3, required 9,
>  CALL_FREE, DRASTIC_REDUCED, FROM_AND_TO_SAME_5, HOME_EMPLOYMENT,
>  LINES_OF_YELLING, MAILTO_LINK, ONCE_IN_LIFETIME, OUTLOOK_FW_MSG,
>  RAZOR2_CHECK, REMOVE_SUBJ, SPAM_PHRASE_13_21, USER_AGENT_OE)

Right, that's the header report, which is similar to the spam assassin
header "X-Spam-Status", where it lists an indication of "spam or not spam"
by saying "Yes" or "No", it lists the number of hits, the required threshold,
and then lists which tests were triggered.  It's almost exactly the same.
(except that mailscanner makes room for other tests in this report).

>
> But, I thought that the SpamAssassin report was supposed to look something
> like this (I left out some of it to conserve space):
>
> SPAM: -------------------- Start SpamAssassin results ----------------------
[snip specific results report]
> SPAM: -------------------- End of SpamAssassin results ---------------------
>

That's the spam assassin body report.  Even spam assassin doesn't call this
its header report.

> And, the file /usr/share/spamassassin/10_misc.cf contains something like
> this.  So, when MailScanner says it's gonna put this in the body or header,
> why do I never see this?  Have I misconfigured something, or am I just
> confused with the terminology used by SpamAssassin and MailScanner (report
> means one thing to SpamAssasin, but means something different to
> MailScanner).

I think the way to look at it is this:

Mailscanner reports what Spam Assassin had in its "X-Spam-Status" header,
but not what Spam Assassin had in its full body report.  AFAIK, there is
no mailscanner option for showing/preserving the body report.


Though, a helper-tool which would take a message or even just a cut-n-paste
of the mailscanner header and make a spam assassin body report out of it
would be cool (I don't have a need to see the full report in the actual
message body, but I sometimes do want to see the gory details for a particular
message).

Of course, the easy way to do that would be to send the message through
spam assassin by hand ... but just being able to see that report from
pasting in the mailscanner header would be nice.  Maybe I'll write
something like that at some point.