amdavidson

Updated .mailfilter for Courier Maildrop and SpamAssassin

posted on 2009-04-26 - amd.im/rnND

My spam count has exploded in the last few days, so I made a decision to adjust my filtering a little more.

Previously, all messages that got more than 5 points in SpamAssassin tests were flagged and sent to my .Spam folder. This got to be a bit of an issue as I still check there to make sure that no emails are miscategorized... Call me crazy, but I'm a bit anal when it comes to that stuff. (I once missed an interview because of Gmail's filters, but that's a story for another day).

For the last few days, I've been reviewing the spam counts for both the more cleverly hidden spam and the less-than-clever spam. I've come to realize that while the odds are low that any real emails will get marked as spam if they do they'll definitely get a score less than 10. So to combat the large amount of spam that's now coming through, maildrop will halt delivery on any emails with a score higher than 10.

Here's what I put in my .mailfilter file for courier-maildrop:

if ( /^X-Spam-Level: \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*.*$/ )
{
exit
}

if ( /X-Spam-Flag/ )
{
to "$DEFAULT.Spam"
}

This way, anything that gets more than won't even be delivered, and all other emails that get a spam flag (greater than 5 points) get sent to spam, then the rest of my filters are processed.

Tested the email with the GTUBE and with a normal message and it seems to work, but we'll see if I wake up in the morning and all my email has been dumped in the trash can.