More SpamAssassin options

Stefan Muth shared this idea

Open Discussion

The control over SpamAssassin is quite limited: Off/On, threshold (score), and Whitelist/Blacklist. I would love to see the following features added:

1) Accessing rejected messages.

There appears to be no way to view or retrieve messages that SpamAssassin has deleted. This would be helpful for seeing exactly how much spam is being received, and also for marking messages as "Not SPAM" and retrieving them.

2) Editing rules.

Some SpamAssassin rules are just plain bad, so how about a feature to edit/toggle them? For example, rule 'RCVD_IN_DNSWL_HI' checks if the sender is whitelisted at dnswl.org and, if it is, adds -5.0 to the SPAM score, basically guaranteeing delivery! The problem is, many spammers have somehow managed to get whitelisted at dnswl.org, and dnswl.org does not respond to emails or take any action when it is reported. Therefore it would be good to be able to 'turn off" rules such as 'RCVD_IN_DNSWL_HI' or at least change its score to -1.0 or 0.0 or whatever.

3) Flagging SPAM instead of deleting.

It says in the tip box on the right, "Enable SpamAssassin to filter junk emails. SpamAssassin will automatically add [SPAM] to the subject of all incoming email messages which were flagged as SPAM."

But this does not in fact happen. Normally there is a flag to say "flag SPAM only, do not delete", which adds the prefix "[SPAM] " at the front of the subject line. This would be a good option to have also.

2 votes

Comments (1)

Vlad | 1 month ago |

Hi, Stefan!

Thanks for your input!

Thanks to your contribution in the Apache SpamAssassin bugzilla system, the devs decided to remove the DNSWL from their default configuration. It was removed from all SPanel servers as well.

Regarding accessing rejected messages, I'd like to point out that emails do not get removed unless you add a custom filter which would remove messages with a spam score higher than a specific value. SpamAssassin only adds [SPAM] in front of the subject and delivers the message to the Spam folder instead of Inbox.

The user has the freedom to control what happens to emails flagged as SPAM via email filters. You can remove them, forward them to another email, pipe to a script etc.

Regarding editing rules, the DNSWL issue is sorted out thanks to your feedback. Every user has access to change the scoring of rules via their own custom SpamAssassin configuration file which is available for editing in /home/username/.spamassassin/user_prefs. I think the configuration as it is at the moment with DNSWL removed is ok and we are also working on deploying Unbound on each server with SPanel so that the RBL checks may all complete rather than being rejected due to using open/free DNS resolvers e.g. Google's or Cloudflare's resolvers. That should improve the spam detection process.