Mailscanner/Spam Assassin support for Microsoft IMF/SCL Spam scoring?

[Duncan, Brian M.]

For those of us that are environments that support MS Exchange and
Outlook 2003+ at the desktop, the capability to support MS IMF (MS
Exchange Intelligent Message Filter scoring) from the network edge is
very beneficial.

 Most organizations that have SpamAssassin/Mailscanner at the edge of
their network rely on custom created rules on clients to move the
SpamAssassin tagged messages into their local "Junk-Mail" folder or Spam
folder - Or delete them right away.

This leads to support issues in large organizations.  Creating custom
exceptions etc, usually in most companies these  local users cannot
manage the rules efficiently.

MS in the last year has released a free add-on for Exchange that works
very similarly to SpamAssassin it assigns a Score to a message that
looks to be in the headers.  Exchange will then automatically put
messages based on the local Outlook clients preference level into their
local Junk Mail folder. The great thing with this is that users can just
right click on messages and add to their "white list" or do complete
domains.  No custom scripts to create,  much easier to support in a
large environment.

If SpamAssassin/Mailscanner could support adding the IMF headers at the
edge, then those that would still like to leverage a SpamAssassin (or
any product for that matter, as long as it used the IMF score header)
solution at the edge of their network they could do so easily.  You
could tune your MS Exchange servers to not be reactive and the
SpamAssasin edge products would dictate what was Spam and what was not.

Microsoft with Exchange 12 is pushing  companies into  putting Exchange
at the edge of a network . I have already had this discussion in my
environment and that I do not think it makes sense given that Sendmail +
Mailscanner + SpamAssassin is almost rock solid.    

At the end of this is a previous message to this mailing list that is
asking for the same thing that I am.

Does anyone have anything to add to this or is this request really not
that worthwhile.

Just the capability of being able to add a generic header to all Spam
detected messages would be a great start:

X-MS-Exchange-Organization-SCL: 6.5

(I have already tested this, all headers that are added by Mailscanner
seems to include additional information added to the same line)

Thanks

Brian Duncan

brian.duncan at kattenlaw.com

P.S.

There is already a product that can sit on an Exchange server that will
convert SpamAssassin scores to equivalent MS IMF Scores.  It would be
great if we could handle it from the Unix/Linux side transparently.
(It's called Assassin2Exchange filter)

http://www.smtptracker.com/ <http://www.smtptracker.com/> 

Previous message that went unanswered to this list:

>Exchange 2003 SP2 has added a "Intelligent Mail Filter" to allow it to
deal with spam messages identified by systems like MailScanner or other
appliance based solutions.

>Basically, it looks for the following header(s):

>X-MS-Exchange-Organization-PCL: (Phishing Confidence Level)
>X-MS-Exchange-Organization-SCL: (Spam Confidence Level)

>More details can be found at:

>http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/E2k7Help/28d3a5c2
-8509-4b25-9876-763536e77c27.mspx?mfr=true

>So, my question is -- can I add this header with MailScanner, inserting
the appropriate spam score after the header, e.g.:

>X-MS-Exchange-Organization-SCL:5

>The trick is, I don't want to mess with my existing header adds, I want
to add this in addition to my normal ones (X-Spam-Score: XX).  I see
where I can add additional headers in the:

>Spam Actions = deliver header "X-Spam-Status: Yes"

>However, it is unclear how to insert the spam score "value" in the
"value" area that it needs to be in.  It is also unclear from the
Microsoft docs if the "score" can be anything other than whole numbers
(e.g. can't be 5.5 but 5 is OK).  So, a way to "round" the score would
be helpful.

>Any pointers?

>--

>-----------------------------------------
>Mike Bacher / listacct at tulsaconnect.com
>TCIS - TulsaConnect Internet Services
>http://www.tulsaconnect.com
>-----------------------------------------



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