using RBL's

[Jules Field]

Mark,

On 30/07/2010 22:22, Mark Chaney wrote:
> I currently have mailscanner 4.79.11-1 and SpamAssassin 3.3.1-3, plus 
> Mailwatch 1.05 installed.
>
> Im a bit confused on how we add rbl's to mailscanner. Basically I have 
> a list of RBL's that i want to use that will not only help identify 
> spam, but also reduce the amount of "analyzing" that MS and SA have to 
> do. Is there anyway get spamassassin or mailscanner to just add the 
> score to the email, but do no further analyzing to save a bit of 
> resources? I know i could just block them at the MTA, but im 
> preferring to just tag or quarantine at this point.
You can add them to the "Spam List" setting in MailScanner.conf. Make 
sure they are defined in spam.lists.conf first though, so the 
MailScanner.conf "nicknames" for each RBL have definitions in 
spam.lists.conf. Most of the popular ones are already there. If you have 
"Check SpamAssassin If On Spam List = no" then once it has decided it's 
spam due to the "Spam List" and "Spam Lists To Be Spam" settings, it 
won't run SpamAssassin on it at all, which will save you *loads* of time 
and CPU power.

>
> I hate to throw another topic in here, but what is the whole Spam 
> Score Headers from mailscanner?
>
> Example: X-MailScanner-SpamScore: sssss
>
> I am not really sure how those S's are helpful and why I would want to 
> have a SA score and a MS score that I would have to create 
> filters/rules for. Is there a way to combine the scores or turn the 
> 's' characters into something a bit more useful?
The whole point is that you can easily filter in your mail client using 
this. Most decent email apps allow you to do things like "If this header 
contains this string then do this action". So to detect a spam score of 
6 or more you just look for the substring "ssssss", rather than trying 
to parse the header value into an integer or float and then do 
comparison on that (which most email apps can't do). So the "s" 
characters are actually very useful to an awful lot of people :-)

Jules

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