Do not scan outgoing messages for spam

Devin Henderson devin.lists at gmail.com
Fri May 23 20:28:43 IST 2008


Sorry, just a couple more things:

@ David Lee:
I completely agree with you. Mail scanning systems should be in place
and configured in order to help *everyone* as a whole. Having said
that, the priority for me, in my job, is to keep my users' legitimate
emails flowing freely and I want to do everything I can to accomplish
that.

Also, I've been using scan.messages.rules to stop spam scanning on
outgoing users' messages but I am just realizing that I should instead
be using spam.whitelist.rules because I want these messages to avoid
being marked as spam but I still want them checked for viruses. Let me
know if my logic is flawed here. For now I will be moving my outgoing
address rules to spam.whitelist.rules.

Thanks,
Devin


On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 1:21 PM, Devin Henderson <devin.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> To everyone:
>
> Thanks for your ideas and information on this. A couple things I
> wanted to mention:
>
> There really is no "spaminess" to the outgoing mail that is being
> marked as spam. We are a large irrigation equipment distributor and
> engineering firm and unless words like sprinkler, valve, pipe and
> quote are considered spammy there is no "spaminess" here (unless one
> of my users has selected tons of legitimate irrigation emails and
> marked them as Spam through sa-learn). I suspect one of the reasons
> this is happening is because I have my spam score variables very low
> because of the inability in the past of my spam filter to successfully
> catch all of the spam we get (we've got a one dictionary word domain,
> maybe that is one cause for so much spam). Currently my Required
> SpamAssassin Score is 2 and my High SpamAssasin Score is 5. Since
> adding spamhaus blacklists to my config this has improved and I think
> it may be time to raise the spam score levels up to a more standard
> level but I'm still receiving some mail that to *me* appears to be
> very obvious spam but either receives a score of 1 or has no score and
> is simply marked 'Found to be clean' and X-Spam-Status: No.
>
> I have about 100 users and these are guys who could be in any of our 5
> offices, in their truck in any number of other states, some who work
> from home in other states, and even users who frequent Mexico for
> engineering jobs. My point is, keeping up with these IP ranges is out
> of the question. I have added all of my known users' email addresses
> to my scan.messages.rules ruleset for now but even this is a fairly
> shoddy solution because I have to manually add addresses to this file
> when new users are created, something that others besides myself do to
> the system from time to time.
>
> If there are any more thoughts on the issue or recommendations for my
> setup I would really appreciate it.
>
> Thanks again,
> Devin
>
>
> On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 5:54 AM, shuttlebox <shuttlebox at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 1:45 PM, Guy Story KC5GOI <kc5goi at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> In the rules directory is a file for whitelisting.  You can put your desired
>>> IP address(s), IP address range, domain name,etc in there.
>>>
>>> I have to agree that this is a bad idea.  If Spamassassin is tagging
>>> outbound as spam, others will tag it as well.
>>
>> Yes, that's a bad idea as it doesn't lighten your load either. Applied
>> to Spam Checks it does.
>>
>> --
>> /peter
>> --
>> MailScanner mailing list
>> mailscanner at lists.mailscanner.info
>> http://lists.mailscanner.info/mailman/listinfo/mailscanner
>>
>> Before posting, read http://wiki.mailscanner.info/posting
>>
>> Support MailScanner development - buy the book off the website!
>>
>


More information about the MailScanner mailing list