faq-detail

Is there a way to filter my incoming email to remove junk-email or spam?

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If you wish to remove junk-email or spam from your incoming mail, we suggest you configure procmail with spamassassin.

Overview

Procmail (http://www.procmail.org) is a filtering tool which filters email based on regular expression matching. SpamAssassin (http://www.spamassassin.or g) is a mail filter to identify spam. SpamAssassin uses several spam-identi fication tactics and assigns points to an email based upon these tactics. Mail which has reached a threshold point value is labelled as spam. The labelled spa m can then be filtered, via procmail in our case.

Simple Configuration

Create a .procmailrc file in your home directory. The contents of this file should be:

.procmailrc

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SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin

FROM=`formail -XFrom: -r -xTo: | tr -d ' '`

:0fw
| if [ -x /usr/local/bin/spamc ]; then /usr/local/bin/spamc; fi

:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
junk-email

Create the .procmail directory in your home directory.

mkdir .procmail

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You mail will now be filtered via procmail and any potential junk-email will be stored in the file junk-email in your home directory.

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Whitelists

You can define a whitelist which is a list of domains and/or addresses from which email will NEVER be tagged as spam.

• Edit the user_prefs file in your .spamassassin directory
• Add one line for each address. Examples:

  whitelist_from        someone@somewhere.com
  whitelist_from        *@somewhere.com
  whitelist_from        *.somewhere.com
  

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Blacklists

A blacklist is a list of domain and/or addresses from which email will ALWAYS be tagged as spam.

• Edit the user_prefs file in your .spamassassin directory
• Add one line for each address. Examples:

  blacklist_from        someone@somewhere.com
  blacklist_from        *@somewhere.com
  blacklist_from        *.somewhere.com
  

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If all that doesn't work

An additional step may be required to ensure proper filtering, you may need to define a .forward file in your home directory to ensure that procmail is envoked for every new email.

.forward

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"| exec /usr/local/bin/procmail"

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Training Spam Assassin

Train Spam Assassin

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Wednesday, February 8th 2012

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