Need to give SpamAssassin some teeth

[MikkyX]

Hi,
Running Plesk 7.5.4 on Debian with SpamAssassin 3.0.3 (and the Plesk module in my licence key), and the config files stored in /etc/spamassassin/

If I create my own *.cf file in this folder my understanding was it would be parsed - but it isn't. I can't enable network tests, or amend rules myself. LOTS of spam which was getting caught on previous ISPs is being allowed through on this one - even blatantly obvious ones.

I need to give SpamAssassin some teeth to bite with before we get drowned, does anyone have any tips on how I'm meant to configure it usefully?

 

[ShadowMan@]

This may not help you in using it via the Plesk control panel, but to get much better results from SA, I added RulesDuJour and ART's qmail-scanner, and updated SA from ART's repository as well.

The end results are much better IMO and the qmail-scanner package has many options for SA. Works with many AV scanners, even multiples simultaneously, really a great package.

ART = atomicrocketturtle.com

Some of the nice options for SA are:

 --sa-forward <username@domain>              (defaults to nothing)
                   User to redirect spam mails 'being quarantined' for
                   admin purposes...
                   The message is forwarded almost unmodified so you can
                   use 'sa-learn' with it.
                   If you prefer that the message includes the spam headers
                   enable the next option.
                   (i.e.  --sa-forward [email][email protected][/email])

  --sa-fwd-verbose [yes|no]       (default: no)
                   Whether to add the X-Spam headers to the forwarded message.

  --sa-quarantine [num]           (default: 0)
                   Spam messages with a score higher than
                   (required_hits + sa_quarantine) should be quarantined.
                   Only relevant if SpamAssassin is used.
                   Score of 0 means deliver all messages.

  --sa-delete [num]               (default: 0)
                   Spam messages with a score higher than
                   (required_hits + sa_delete) should be deleted.
                   Only relevant if SpamAssassin is used.
                   Score of 0 means deliver all messages.

  --sa-reject [yes|no]            (default: no)
                   If you enable sa-reject and sa-delete is properly set,
                   messages with a score higher than sa-delete will be rejected
                   before the smtp session is closed. Otherwise they are just
                   dropped silently. (1/0)

Oh, and did I mention it's FREE? Plesk's GUI interface for many things (including SA and Firewall) are way too limiting. With qmail-scanner, it's all automatic, once you set the config options in the qmail-scanner-queue.pl file, it just works!

 

[MikkyX]

Thanks for that - sounds like fun! But I was hoping for a nice, simple "edit this file" sort of solution.

I wouldn't know where to start implementing your suggestion!