Turning On Spam Checks with Script

[Julian Field]

At 18:47 06/05/2003, you wrote:
>What I would like to do is setup Mailscanner so it does Spam checks but all
>users are whitelisted by default.  So if they want Spam checks they must
>turn it on and they will have no reason to complain to me about seeing there
>email tagged with {SPAM?}.
>
>To explain.  If a user wants Spam checks enabled on there email account they
>would go to a webpage, enter there email address in a form and that would
>enable Spam checks for them.  If they later decide they do not like getting
>a bunch of there email tagged with {SPAM?} they could go back and enter
>there email in a removal form and turn it off.  It would also be nice if
>they could enter a from addresses to whitelist in a form if its being tagged
>incorrectly.  All these forms should have access restricted to local IP
>subnets I control for security.
>
>Is something like this possible with a perl script?  I imagine one gotcha is
>that if a config file is modified by a script it will not take affect until
>mailscanner is restarted but that occurs every 6 hours I thought?

What I would do is turn on and off their {SPAM?} Subject: line tag, not the
actual spam checking. Then if a "power user" wants to do his/her own
filtering on the SpamScore header (for example) but doesn't want the
Subject: line tag, then they can do it.

How you the implement it depends on how many users you are talking about.
If it's only a few hundred or so, I would recommend rebuilding a
"spam.modify.subject.rules" file which is pointed to by an entry in
MailScanner.conf like this:
Spam Modify Subject = /etc/MailScanner/rules/spam.modify.subject.rules

Then make that file say
FromOrTo:       default         no
To:             user1 at domain.com        yes
To:             user2 at domain.com        yes
and so on.

If you are talking thousands of users, a database table might be better.
You can suck in the DB table when MailScanner starts, then just do a very
fast hash table lookup for each message. This will be very quick. If you
have a "semaphore flag" file somewhere that indicates if the DB table has
been modified recently, and a cron job to "reload" MailScanner, you can
restart it every hour or so if any users have modified their settings.
--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
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