Knowledge Base - FAQ
Question: Do you provide any tools or software that prevents your members from recieving spam?Yes, we have Spam Assassin installed. It's a great package that adds headers and appends a brief tag to the subject when it detects spam.
Spam can be too much of a grey area for us to block it completely, so we're leaving the filtering and blocking in your (the client's) capable hands. There are several ways to filter spam in your mail client now that we are scanning it and assigning it a spam score:
Method #1: Subject line blocking.
Our system will add the text {Possible Spam?} to the subject for mail with a Spam Assassin index higher than 5. If you want to filter possible spam, just look for that text in your subject line filters.
Our system will add the text {Likely Spam} to the subject for mail with a Spam Assassin index higher than 20. This is similar to the prior rule, but this will catch the messages that are highly likely to be spam.
Our webmail filter system can use this method of blocking spam. Just click "Options", "Filters", "Edit your filter rules", then add the appropriate subject line filters for the text mentioned above.
Method #2: Mail header blocking.
All mail passing through our cluster will now have two new headers added to them:
X-MailScanner-SpamCheck: X-MailScanner-SpamScore:
The first header will have details about the actual spam check. The second will have a spam score. For each point toward the spam score, a single s character will be appended. So for a mail with a spam score of 7, the header will look like this:
X-MailScanner-SpamScore: sssssss
Thus if you wanted to filter spam with a score of 15 or higher, you could simply check for 15 s's in a row.
We believe (but are not certain) that Outlook and Procmail can support this method. We do not believe Outlook express supports it. Contact your mail client software vendor for details and/or assistance.
Note that we do run procmail. So if you want to setup a .procmailrc file in your home directory to play with this type of filtering, feel free. Please be careful though, it's all too easy to lose incoming mail with typos in your .procmailrc file.
Last Modified: Mar 09, 2003