Per-User SpamAssassin Scores?

[Julian Field]

At 21:58 10/06/2004, you wrote:
>I've been using MailScanner for over two years with excellent results. I'm
>now ready to jump into to the SpamAssassin side of MS. However, I need to
>set up a per-user scoring system if possible. I wanting to write a CGI
>which would allow users to log in and enable/disable spam assassin for
>their account as well as set their own scores. I read some material in the
>past about using a partial MySQL backend with MailScanner. With the
>frequency of changes which would occur, I think using MySQL to manage this
>would be best. Is this possible to do?

Doing an SQL lookup for every recipient of every message is quite expensive
if you have a lot of mail.

What we have done is have a simple DB file generated hourly from an SQL
table, by a cron job. The MailScanner system uses a custom function to suck
in the whole table at startup, then just lookup values in the internal hash
table while running (which is really fast). The MailScanner children
restart every hour, so the worst case is 2 hours between a user changing
their preferences and the change taking effect.

Due to the nature of spam, you can't tell if your new settings are better
than your old ones without waiting a day or so. So the max 2 hour delay
doesn't cause any problem at all, the users don't even notice it.

We have the normal threshold fixed at 6, and "Spam Actions = deliver". We
let the users set the high-scoring threshold to anywhere between 5 and 10,
and use "High Scoring Spam Actions = delete" to auto-delete spam scoring
above their high threshold. They also have the ability to switch off the
high threshold altogether, so that all their spam is delivered. That is how
their accounts are set to start with, they have to opt in to the
auto-deletion service.
--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
Professional Support Services at www.MailScanner.biz
MailScanner thanks transtec Computers for their support
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