Hello,
I'm still part-testing spamassassin 2.20, but I was asked by some of our
users if it could be modified to have a second threshold level - what I have
called a cutoff level. Below is a description of what I have done, although
I now need to carry it forward to the new version of spamassassin. Has
anyone else done anything like this, perhaps as a nicer solution; does
anyone see any problems with it (I've yet to get the go-ahead to make it
fully live); and should I put in into bugzilla under a wishlist item (i.e.
would anyone else be interested in anything like this)?
At present spamassassin will mark mail as spam or not (the X-SPAM-FLAG: YES
header), and the users MUA can filter on this. Our users can setup their own
spam threshold and other config options. However, this only splits mail into
'spam' or 'not spam'. What was wanted was a further threshold which
indicated that the message was extremely likely to be spam and therefore
could safely (according to the users preference) be discarded. Setting a
high 'required_hits' would not achieve this since lesser spam (?) would get
through unmarked. Trying to configure an MUA to parse the X-SPAM-STATUS to
see if the returned number of hits is above some other value seems somewhat
impossible. MUA's will filter on the presence/absence of headers, whether
strings are present in a header, etc, but performing a 'comparison' doesn't
seem possible.
To that end I added a new configuration option which is exactly like
required_hits and will set a 'X-SPAM-CUTOFF: xx' header, where 'xx' is the
value they have set. This allows the user to set (for example):
required_hits: 8
cutoff_threshold: 14
They can then filter in the MUA:
any mail which is most likely to be spam and can be discarded (number of
hits is greater than cutoff_threshold; indicated by
X-SPAM-CUTOFF header);
any mail deemed likely to be spam (number of hits greater than
required_hits but less than cutoff_threshold; indicated by
X-SPAM-FLAG)
Note that if X-SPAM_CUTOFF is set then X-SPAM-FLAG will also be set, so the
rules must be in the above order. Setting the cutoff less than or equal to
the 'required_hits' value will simply cause the first filter to handle all
spam marked mail. Whether the user discards it or simply puts the mail into
a different folder is of course up to them.
That's it. Regards,
John.
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John Horne, University of Plymouth, UK Tel: +44 (0)1752 233914
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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