Spam blocking.

Ace and prime run the mimedefang and SpamAssassin software packages. These software packages examine your email, and assign a spam score to the messages based upon a number of different criteria. We use a conservative subset of rules to minimize the number of non-spam messages tagged as spam. See the SpamAssassin home page for more detailed information.

Email detected as spam has the Subject line automatically modified with the phrase "*LIKELY SPAM*" added to it. If you want to automatically delete incoming spam, or save it in a file in your home directory for later examination, follow the steps listed below:

To Save Spam In A File

To save all incoming messages marked as SPAM into a file in your home directory, you need to add several lines to your .procmailrc file. If you do not already have one, just make one with only the lines shown. The lines are:


:0
* ^X-Spam-Score:.*\*\*\*\*\*
spam_mail_file



Then, execute the command:
       chmod 644 .procmailrc
to give the proper permissions to the file. This will allow you to review the messages marked as spam at a later time. You can replace the name spam_mail_file with the file name of your choice. Note that you WILL have to clean out this file or it will grow in size until it uses up your entire disk quota.

To Delete Spam Before Receiving It

To delete all messages marked as spam before they are placed in your system mail box, use these lines instead:


:0
* ^X-Spam-Score:.*\*\*\*\*\*
/dev/null

in your .procmailrc file. Your will receive no notification of the deleted messages.

Modifying the spam score

For some people, the default scoring of spam is wrong. This may be true for people who have mailing lists discussing topics such as drugs, software for sale, or other popular spam topics. In this case, you can modify the code added to your .procmail file to require a higher degree of certainty that the message is spam before deleting it. To do this, add addition pairs of \* characters to the the X-Spam-Score line. Likewise, deleting one or more pairs of characters lowers the spam threshold. Care should be taken in lowing the threshold, as many email programs add some small characteristics to email that appear to be spam indicators. The default values have been chosen as a level that eliminates the majority of spam we can detect, while allowing thru virtually all regular email.