How can I test if SpamAssassin is working properly?

I'm very new to Mac Mail Server. We're running Mail Server on a 10.4.10 Server. We still get a LOT of SPAM every day. I'm getting complaints from just about everyone. The Mail App does a good job of filtering, but I (and the company president) want(s) to have the SPAM stopped at the server before it ever gets to the clients.

How can I tell if SpamAssassin is doing it's job correctly? I use SpamTrainer, but it seems that we get the same SPAM over and over. If SpamAssassin was working correctly then you'd think we wouldn't get the same SPAM day in and day out.

I've searched sites and tried to learn how to configure files and it's all so daunting. Isn't there an easier way to stop SPAM on Mac Mail Server? Our old mail server used its own program to filter SPAM and it worked a lot better than this one.

Any tips you can give me would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Intel iMac, Mac OS X (10.4.10),  iPhone 8GB

Posted on Sep 25, 2007 9:31 AM

17 replies

Garner Author

Level 1

8 points

Sep 26, 2007 11:06 AM in response to David_x

Thanks for all the help. I'm getting much more comfortable with this stuff now. One question though. Is it possible to deliver the messages that were caught as SPAM still? I did have it set to delete them, but they are still in the /var/virusmails folder. You can imagine that the sales people here are worried they missed important messages.

If it's not possible, oh well. They'll be mad at me... It could be worse.

And Joel, it looks like raising the threshold and letting the messages be delivered is working. I have received a few emails (still marked as Junk, but I'll experiment with that), so at least the mail is being delivered to clients. Thanks. 🙂

David_x

Level 4

3,011 points

Sep 27, 2007 2:19 AM in response to Garner

Garner wrote:
One question though. Is it possible to deliver the messages that were caught as SPAM still? I did have it set to delete them, but they are still in the /var/virusmails folder. You can imagine that the sales people here are worried they missed important messages.

See recent thread on this...
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1148754&tstart=0

If you have your min spam score set to new higher level, you can use the following to re-send them all to your own account and then read them in mail client, forwarding on any which are not spam...

In Terminal, on server, change to root user and move to the /var/virusmails directory...

su (you will need to enter password)
cd /var/virusmails

uncompress all the spam ones...

gunzip spam-*

send all the messages, one at a time, to your own mail account...

for message in spam-* ; do cat $message | mail -s "quarantined mail" you@yourdomain.com ; done

change back to admin user...

exit

Note that the messages will all go through spamassassin again and only the ones which are under your new min score will get through to your account.

-david

Message was edited by: David_x - added "spam-" to avoid virus ones.

This thread has been closed by the system or the community team. You may vote for any posts you find helpful, or search the Community for additional answers.

How can I test if SpamAssassin is working properly?