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Spamassassin Tag & Reject Thresholds

Hello, I've got spamassassin working fine and dandy, tagging the subject line of any message that comes in over 6 points, which is then filed into the junk folder of my user's client software for their review.

What I'd like to also be able to do is to reject messages at the server level over a score of 15 points, preferably with a rejection notice explaining why to the sender, just in case some human actually did manage to make a good message look that badly like spam.

Anyone know if this is possible?

Posted on Aug 17, 2007 2:39 PM

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4 replies

Aug 17, 2007 3:41 PM in response to Michael_Brown

You may check out the amavis configuration file at /etc/amavisd.conf - guess with some advanced knowledge of this app you are surely able to manage this. But as far as I can remember from my configuration efforts, there is no out-of-the-box solution.

More in-depth information about amavisd-new: http://www.ijs.si/software/amavisd/

Message was edited by: tobias Eichner

Aug 17, 2007 3:50 PM in response to Michael_Brown

Well, when you implement such a way consider that spammers often use fake sender e-mail addresses; so either the "returned" mail reaches someone innocent or is getting lost somewhere on the Internet.

In worst case, your rejected message returns back to the server. I guess that OS X mail service is intelligent enough to detect that the mail has been already returned once, otherwise it could happen that these two mail servers (your OS X server and the target one) sending back and forth such undeliverable messages which can dramatically increase your network traffic.

So finally I don't see much sense in your efforts. I made the experience that a well configured SpamAssassin (with Razor2, DCC, other network checks turned on, trained bayes) is highly effective.

Aug 18, 2007 8:06 AM in response to Michael_Brown

Hello, I've got spamassassin working fine and dandy, tagging the subject line of any message that comes in over 6 points, which is then filed into the junk folder of my user's client software for their review.


What I'd like to also be able to do is to reject messages at the server level over a score of 15 points, preferably with a rejection notice explaining why to the sender, just in case some human actually did manage to make a good message look that badly like spam.


Anyone know if this is possible?


This is certainly possible, but of no use whatsoever. You don't want to be bouncing spam and especially not spam with a score above 15. The likeliness of a message with a score above 15 being legit mail is close (very) to nil. Furthermore you will fill your mail queue with undeliverable mail.

If you still want to do this (you have been warned 😉 :
Edit /etc/amavisd.conf and change:
$sa kill_leveldeflt = $sa tag2_leveldeflt;
to
$sa tag2_leveldeflt = 6.0;
$sa kill_leveldeflt = 15.0;

and make sure "final spamdestiny" is:
$final spamdestiny = D_BOUNCE;

Spamassassin Tag & Reject Thresholds

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