At 9:47 AM +0200 06/20/2013, Tom Hendrikx wrote:
Since mailscanner already has support for integrating spamassassin [1]
(As I mentioned explicitly in a previous email...)
why would you ever want to put work in reversing some of mailscanners
'protection'?
Because, given the particularls of my system setup, I don't want to
have MailScanner running spamassassin -- I need them to be
independent. Hence, if I cared enough about having the web bugs pop
in SA, I would want SA to "reverse" the MailScanner effects, not to
have MailScanner run SA.
BTW, I'm not talking about _actually_ reversing MailScanner's
"protection." I'm talking about SA understanding enough to unmunge
the URI **for SA processing only**. The actual mail delivered to the
end-user would remain munged. SA would not be reversing anything, it
would simply have sufficient know-how to parse what MailScanner had
done.
or disable the url munging in mailscanner?
I don't want to disable the URI munging for the reasons I outlined in
a previous email: in short, I don't want end-users interacting with
spam-increasing web bugs.
For the result that you want to achieve (get protection from both
filters), your proposed solution seems to be the hardest way to success.
I will disagree with you on this point, mostly because you don't know
the particulars of my system setup and therefore all of the
"difficulties" that would arise with implementing a different
solution.
Let me be clear: I'm perfectly satisfied with doing nothing about
unmunging MailScanner. As I mentioned in a previous email, in every
case where a web bug gets munged, that same domain is linked
elsewhere in the email and is inevitably processed by SA (I won't say
"caught" since that requires the domain to be blacklisted, which may
not be the case when processed). Thus, I don't actually believe that
this web bug munging is causing significant harm to SA's processing.
But, Axb's responses indicated that he/she seemed to think it would
be an issue. Thus, I suggested that a plugin could be written to
"unmunge" the munged web bug. (Again, this would be purely for SA
internal processing, and the delivered mail would retain
MailScanner's "protection.") The plugin COULD be as simple as taking
MailScanner's default format, processing it through a regexp to pick
the original URI out of the img tag's alt attribute, and passing that
to the URIBL plugin (which seems pretty simple to me). Or, it could
be more complex to take into account potential user configurations of
MailScanner, and thus would read the MailScanner config files.
Personally, I don't think my proposed solution is all that complex,
and certainly no more complex than trying to figure out how to get
MailScanner to play properly with SA given my particular virtual
hosting setup. On the other hand, as I mentioned 2 paragraphs up,
I'm also OK with doing nothing, which is certainly the easiest and
least error-prone solution.
So, let's all just realize that this was primarily a thought
experiment, nobody seems interested in following or implementing it,
and (particularly at this point) I don't think it's worth it any more.
I apologize for getting everyone's gander up. I'll drop this
MailScanner subject and return to my hole.
Cheers.
--- Amir
