MailScanner implementation

[chris albert]

>Team:
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>
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<snip>

>-  IF the inbound mail hits the SA limit of say 5, then rather than
>rewriting the subjects and sending out the emails to the intended
>recipients, I would like MailScanner to simply place this "hot" email into a
>SPAMBOX, and not send out ANY emails.
>
I think this is a mistake. SA is not foolproof. You will get FPs, and
the score appropriate
for your site to flag for quarantine or deletion could take weeks to
determine. Moreover, you'll
need a spam/ham feedback look from your users to train the bayesian db.
If you test properly and train , you'll be able to determine a
high-score for quarantine or deletion without much risk of FPs,
but there will be a grey area best left to MUA filters. Frankly, it is
also good PR for you for your
users to see emails tagged as spam. Your users will get involved, and
frankly in my experience
I got great feedback.

>Otherwise, I will have to teach people how to write filters and rules within
>the Outlook exchange client, which I really don't want to do.
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This is easy. Google 'spamassassin configuration' and you will find
detailed isp sites listing configs for multiple MUAs
 that you can model on or even wget to set up a site of your own.

I can emphasize enough -- spam is polymorphic and constantly mutating.
Even between SA releases you'll
see a degradation in its ability to catch spam. The bayesian filters
will help, but they need to be continually
trained. Some of that is automated by MS, but what is spam is a semantic
question, which only humans are
really good at answering at this stage in AI development.

Chris