Are all cf files used in spamassassin

[rd...@monroehosp.org]

I am a novice with spamassassin.  I am having a problem getting my arms 
around several concepts.  Here are several questions.

In looking at the local.cf, I see that the threshhold for marking a piece 
of mail as spam is 5.  Can I have this mail deleted instead of being sent 
to the user? 

In the /usr/share/spamassassin directory there are a number of cf files. 
Does spamassassin use all these files as tests as a default setting?  If 
not, how do I make sure they are used?

Richmond H. Dyes
Monroe Community Hospital
IS Department Head
760-6213

Re: Are all cf files used in spamassassin

[Matt Kettler <mk...@verizon.net>]

rdyes@monroehosp.org wrote:
>
> I am a novice with spamassassin.  I am having a problem getting my
> arms around several concepts.  Here are several questions.
>
> In looking at the local.cf, I see that the threshhold for marking a
> piece of mail as spam is 5.  Can I have this mail deleted instead of
> being sent to the user? 
SpamAssassin cannot do this directly, as it has no control over the
message envelope. If SA were to try, most mail tools would assume it
errored and recover the original, unscanned, message.

However, lots of mail tools that do have control of the envelope can be
configured to delete the message, properly, if they see SA's marked it
as spam..

Thus, the answer here depends on what other tools you're using in your
mail processing. Generally folks use procmail rules to do this, but
there are lots of other ways depending on what you've got in your setup..
>
>
> In the /usr/share/spamassassin directory there are a number of cf
> files.  Does spamassassin use all these files as tests as a default
> setting? 
Yes, unless there's a newer directory created by sa-update. (ie:
/var/lib/spamassassin/3.002003/updates_spamassassin_org/)
> If not, how do I make sure they are used?
spamassassin --lint -D will, among other things, list every file SA
reads, assuming you've got a reasonably recent version of SA.

Re: Are all cf files used in spamassassin

[jdow <jd...@earthlink.net>]

From: <rd...@monroehosp.org>
Sent: Thursday, 2007, October 11 10:06


>I am a novice with spamassassin.  I am having a problem getting my arms
> around several concepts.  Here are several questions.
>
> In looking at the local.cf, I see that the threshhold for marking a piece
> of mail as spam is 5.  Can I have this mail deleted instead of being sent
> to the user?

SpanAssassin creates scores. Tools like procmail, mailscanner, and others
can take that score and handle the spam. For a hospital I'd include the
score in the email markup header and let the users redirect the spam as
they see fit. I always review it. The markup I use can sort the spam
mail by score. I examine at least the low scoring spam to see if any ham
got through. I can tell very reliably from the score, subject, and source
whether it is spam or not.
===8<---
# How many hits before a mail is considered spam.
required_hits           5.0
rewrite_header Subject     *****SPAM***** _SCORE(00)_ **
===8<---

That gives a three digit spam score with leading zeros. Spam sorts very
nicely that way. This habit has saved me a couple real financial transaction
emails due to the sender changing its email configuration.

> In the /usr/share/spamassassin directory there are a number of cf files.
> Does spamassassin use all these files as tests as a default setting?  If
> not, how do I make sure they are used?

If it has .cf after the file it uses it. The files are used in alphabetical
order. I've never tried to confirm that every one is used. I've never seen
any indication that one is being skipped. You could run "spamassassin
--lint -D" and parse the output for the name of each of the cf files.

{^_^}    Joanne