Blocking Spam

[jdow]

From: "Tim" <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au>

> On Mon, 2006-12-25 at 18:39 -0800, jdow wrote:
>> It needs Archive::Tar?
>
> Apparently so...  ["It" being part of spam assassin.]
>
>> How are you installing it?
>
> It was the default installation that came with FC5, plus any updates
> that might have happened in the meantime.
>
> On other boxes I had decided not to bother installing spam assassin, and
> until recently didn't use it.  Evolution is painfully slow when it does
> *ANY* filtering, and five spams a day versus nearly 200 non-spams a day,
> meant that manual deletion isn't much of a chore.  And there's something
> rather satisfying about saying, "Die you spam, die!," as you hit delete.
> I just decided to try it out, to see how it does its tricks.  And to see
> if it's going to be a practical solution for a friend of mine who seems
> to have the opposite spam:ham ratio.

NEVER EVER use SpamAssain as a filter for a mail reading agent.
NEVER EVER use SpamAssain as a filter for a mail reading agent.
NEVER EVER use SpamAssain as a filter for a mail reading agent.

I have told you three times therefore it must be true.

That said read up on fetchmail. It can deliver direct to your machine.
Then evolution can read directly from the mail directory or, if you
start dovecot or something like that, it can read from any machine on
your network. (That is how Loren and I handle our email. It is collected
on one machine and read on another.)

Fetchmail does the filtering via procmail here. This line in .fetchmailrc
does it. (We each run our own fetchmail with individual accounts we
fetch from.)

defaults mda "/usr/bin/procmail -d XXX"
(Replace XXX with the username. It is probably not necessary but "it works";
and I've not tried to fix it.

Procmail calls spamassassin with these lines in ".procmailrc".

SHELL=/bin/sh
DROPPRIVS=yes

:0
* < 500000
{
   :0 fw: spamassassin.lock
   | /usr/bin/spamc -t 150 -u XXX
}

(XXX == username again. Perhaps it's overkill. It works. I'm not fixing it.)

The timeout parameter, -t 150, is about right here with a 1GHz Athlonish
type machine and a lot of network tests enabled.

In the init.d file you can tune the number of children spawned by spamd.
(It's the same algorithm as Apache httpd.) You can also tune how many
times a child gets used before it gets killed and a new one is created.

I note my .procmailrc file is much fancier than the above. I have a lot
of simple "anti-pest" stuff in it such as trolls blacklisted with
extreme prejudice to /dev/null. Bug me too many times, like the UOL.com.br
challenge response "thing" and /dev/null happens. {^_-}

{^_^}