SpamAssassin

Introduction

In order to combat the increasing problem of unsolicited commercial email (spam), we have started using SpamAssassin on incoming email. We do not and will not actually filter mail so you will still receive all mail that arrives at our server addressed to you. Instead, SpamAssassin adds some additional headers to incoming email that will allow you to easily filter incoming email yourself using procmail, or your email client.

How to filter your mail

The easiest way to filter mail is to look for a spam flag header. SpamAssassin marks all mail that it considers spam by adding the following header:

X-Spam-Status: Yes

You can use a procmail filter to save all spam in a separate mailbox. To do this, create a .forward file in your home directory with the following contents:

|/usr/bin/procmail -f-

Then create a .procmailrc file containing:

:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
mail/spam

This filter will save spam into a folder called mail/spam. Note that it is not possible at this point to use Exim Filters to sort spam. This is because the SpamAssassin headers do not get added until mail is actually delivered to a file or another process (e.g. procmail).