On X-Spam-Status, X-Spam-Flag, X-MailScanner-SpamCheck, and other weirdness

[Jules Field]

MailScanner does not use any header generated by SpamAssassin. It does 
not allow SpamAssassin to modify the message. It adds its own headers, 
based on the spam status and report returned by SpamAssassin. So you 
won't get the same headers you get from using spamd or anything like 
that from your MTA. You will get the headers that MailScanner adds based 
on the output of SpamAssassin (which is basically a report and a spam 
score number).

Hope that helps explain it a bit.

Jules.

On 14/08/2009 17:31, Mauricio Tavares wrote:
>     This email does not sound like a question; it is more about weird 
> thoughts that are haunting me. Expect then a lot of confusion because 
> that is how I am feeling right now. I am just trying to figure out 
> what is going on here.
>
> I have been using X-Spam-Status: as a trigger for my dovecot sieve 
> script to move spam into a Spam folder. Playing around with it, I 
> found something interesting (at least to me): If I create a proper 
> spam email and add to its header something like this:
>
> X-Spam-Status: No (or maybe or spongebob for that matters)
>
> and then send the spam to your my server, Mailscanner will properly 
> detect it as spam and then edit X-Spam-Status like this:
>
> X-Spam-Status: No, Yes
>
> I was going to include my sieve script but what I am trying to figure 
> out is something else. In MailScanner.conf we have these two lines:
>
> Spam Actions = deliver header "X-Spam-Status: Yes"
> Non Spam Actions = deliver header "X-Spam-Status: No"
>
> I thought that indicated that if there was a X-Spam-Status header in 
> the mail, it would be wiped and replaced with ones of the 
> X-Spam-Status headers shown above. Also, it seems that while 
> spamassassin would do something like
>
> X-Spam-Status: spam, SpamAssassin (cached, score=9.645,    required 
> 4.7, BAYES_50 0.00, FH_HELO_ENDS_DOT 2.31,    FORGED_MUA_OUTLOOK 3.12, 
> HTML_MESSAGE 0.90, MSOE_MID_WRONG_CASE 0.82,    RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_51_100 
> 0.50, RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_E4_51_100 1.50,    RAZOR2_CHECK 0.50)
> X-Spam-Flag: YES
>
> MailScanner does the same using its own header,
>
> X-MailScanner-SpamCheck: spam, SpamAssassin (cached, score=9.645, 
> required 4.7, BAYES_50 0.00, FH_HELO_ENDS_DOT 2.31, FORGED_MUA_OUTLOOK 
> 3.12, HTML_MESSAGE 0.90, MSOE_MID_WRONG_CASE 0.82, 
>  RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_51_100 0.50, RAZOR2_CF_RANGE_E4_51_100 1.50, 
> RAZOR2_CHECK 0.50)
> X-Spam-Status: Yes
>
> So, MailScanner uses X-Spam-Status the same way spamassassin uses 
> X-Spam-Flag.

Jules

-- 
Julian Field MEng CITP CEng
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