Re: [sa] RE: Suggestion for use by ANY whitelist service....

[Charles Gregory <cg...@hwcn.org>]

On Mon, 7 Dec 2009, R-Elists wrote:
>> Nonsense. I had to score this list -2000 just to keep it from
>> scoring so darn high that it was hitting the 'automatic'
>> rejection at the SMTP gate before any of my whitelists could
>> function.
> Charles,
> you would be better off properly whitelisting the SA mailing list...
> depending on your situation, possibly to and from...

That -2000 score IS the 'whitelisting'. As mentioned in OP, my SMTP 
gateway is set to detect mail scoring very high (over 10) and issue an 
SMTP REJECT response, so that I don't have to deal with the bounce, or an 
overly cluttered spam file. The very rare false positive results in the 
sender seeing their rejection, so they see what to fix in their mail.
Works well except for cases like the SA list where I trip over my own 
poison pill rules.... LOL

> also possibly telling bayes to ignore those emails to and from as 
> well...

Sadly, with such a diverse user base, I cannot use a single Bayes DB that 
would work well for all our users. My SMTP gateway (Mail Avenger) works 
best if mail is scanned for *all* recipients, and so it is not possible to 
use individual per-user Bayes. This is not an SA problem, but just the 
nature of the SMTP gateway. It has to decide to accept or reject the DATA 
transaction for ALL recipients. Once mail proves to be lower scoring than 
the 10 threshold, individual user whitelists and blacklists come into 
play, and other special per-user tests, but that merely results in mail 
being diverted to their 'spamtrap' folder. I do not 'bounce' mail once the 
SMTP gate is closed. :)

- Charles

RE: Suggestion for use by ANY whitelist service....

[Charles Gregory <cg...@hwcn.org>]

On Tue, 8 Dec 2009, Mike Cardwell wrote:
> On 08/12/2009 16:35, Charles Gregory wrote:
>> ..... My SMTP gateway (Mail Avenger) works best if mail is scanned for 
>> *all* recipients, and so it is not possible to use individual per-user 
>> Bayes. ....
> In cases were there is only a single recipient, I run SpamAssassin at
> SMTP time as the destination user.

Unfortunately, "Mail Avenger" does not have a mechanism to make decisions 
like that. I simply tell it which script to run against the body/data.
If that script has user-specific code, the SMTP engine forces all
recipients after the first to tempfail before it ever sees the body.
Not the best design, but at least for me it is a simple script-controlled
way of putting SA on the SMTP transaction. :)

This also prevents determination of almost-full mailbox conditions, so 
that I sometimes have to generate bounces... :(

I've written to the Mail Avenger author, hoping he'll add a 'feature' to 
distinguish when there is only one recipient and allow scripts to do more 
under that condition.... no response yet.... :)

- C

Re: [sa] RE: Suggestion for use by ANY whitelist service....

[Mike Cardwell <sp...@lists.grepular.com>]

On 08/12/2009 16:35, Charles Gregory wrote:

> Sadly, with such a diverse user base, I cannot use a single Bayes DB
> that would work well for all our users. My SMTP gateway (Mail Avenger)
> works best if mail is scanned for *all* recipients, and so it is not
> possible to use individual per-user Bayes. This is not an SA problem,
> but just the nature of the SMTP gateway. It has to decide to accept or
> reject the DATA transaction for ALL recipients. Once mail proves to be
> lower scoring than the 10 threshold, individual user whitelists and
> blacklists come into play, and other special per-user tests, but that
> merely results in mail being diverted to their 'spamtrap' folder. I do
> not 'bounce' mail once the SMTP gate is closed. :)

In cases were there is only a single recipient, I run SpamAssassin at
SMTP time as the destination user. In cases where there are multiple
recipients, it runs as the "nobody" user. This allows me to have per
user preferences and bayes applied to the vast majority of incoming
mail, during SMTP; only a tiny proportion of incoming mail here is
multi-recipient... YMMV

-- 
Mike Cardwell - IT Consultant and LAMP developer
Cardwell IT Ltd. (UK Reg'd Company #06920226) http://cardwellit.com/
Technical Blog: https://secure.grepular.com/blog/