From: "drkwc" <dr...@mindbodyspiritjournal.com>
Sent: Tuesday, 2009/September/15 21:20
Jdow, you're pretty sophisticated with this. Afraid much of what you
described is beyond my skillset and/or patience for mastering at the
moment.
>Am wondering if I can have two different settings. One for auto delete
and
>another for marking and delivering emails?
But why? And how would you differentiate them?
With my setup I could use two .procmailrc files and use a script to
switch between them. "But why?"
My "Why" is that I get 1,500-plus spams daily on some of my older domains.
It is my understanding that in SpamAssassin any email that scores 10 hits
or
more is almost certainly spam (with an extremely, extremely low FP rate)
and
that more than 80% of true spam detected by SpamAssassin has a score of 10
or higher. So, if I can just eliminate that 80-plus% of the spam -- at
server level -- sight unseen, then I don't have to download it to my
computer, tying up my connection, and I don't have to sort through it in a
spam folder in Outlook Express.
I've just moved my sites to Hostgator.com. Actually still moving them.
And,
yes, it's cPanel is extremely warm and fuzzy. I'd much prefer the standard
out-of-the-box cpanel I've been working with for at least half a decade.
I'll devote more time to mastering SpamAssassin when I'm in a position to
budget that time to the task. And I'll have to demystify Hostgator's
modified cPanel in the process. But bet that, with some help then, I can
get
some rules written that will accomplish what I want.
In the past, I've redirected most of my domains' email accounts through
gmail, which does a wonderful job of sorting out the spam (and
automatically
deleting everything in the spam folder that ages to 30 days). But, as I
can,
I'd like to master SpamAssassin and see if I can get it to do what I need
it
to do.
I need it to kill the obvious spam (even if there is a 1 in 2,000 chance
that it will kill a legitimate email in the process. I'll accept that
level
of loss). And I need it to deliver (and let me filter to a spam folder on
my
hard-drive) those that it identifies as less certain, but probable spam.
Hope that can be accomplished.
Hostgator told me that with their setup, using their SpamAssassin
controls,
I can't set two concurrent rules. i.e. I can't tell SpamAssassin to
autodelete any mail with a score of 10 or higher and also tell it to mark
as
[SPAM] and deliver any mail with a score between 5 and 10.
So, for now, I'm told I can't do what I want it to do.
Putting it bluntly you cannot delete anything with SpamAssassin as it
comes out of the distribution chain. You can mark it up, though. You
need to get further into the chain before you can play delete games
based on score. (It appears hostgator, whatever it is, only looks for
the X-Spam: yes tag and deletes on it. That's hostgator's bad. You can
have the spam score markup in the mail several different ways. Once you
know the score and have an adequate tool for the task you could, if you
wanted humor in your life, delete all messages scoring between 10 and
50. (Spams that score that high are often quite funny.) With some of
the potential markups you could even use features of the markups to
effectively re-score the message a little based on which of your email
addresses it was received on. (But, it's easier to do that within the
SA configuration files.)
The more you want to do with SA the more you have to learn and piddle
around with. And some of what you have to piddle with is murky and
obscure. (Procmail syntax is "strange" to say the least. And when you
put "formail", which is part of the procmail package, into the mix the
mind boggles.
And, for all its being a Microsoft tool you CAN do some interesting
magic within OutlookDepress and delete messages. So you have a lot of
tools at your disposal. The variety may depend on what operating systems
you have available for handling the mail. It all depends on how much you
want to get your hands (and mind {^_-}) dirty working with and learning
those tools.
{^_^}
