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

[Mauricio Tavares]

Jules Field wrote:
> 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).
> 
	I thought that MailScanner used X-Spam-Status, which is also used by 
spamassassin but in a different way.

> 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
>