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Get Mail to use ISP's non-standard spam headers
Of course, these "non-standard" mail headers are the ones provided by the open source SpamAssassin toolkit. It may not be an IETF standard or a formal RFC, but it's a widely used and very high quality product, so calling it "non-standard" is kind of a pointless cheap shot. That said, SpamAssassin is highly configurable, and not every installation will attach the same headers to processed messages. To deal with this, it will help to have a rough grasp of how SpamAssassin works. To wit: SpamAssassin is a framework for applying a series of rules to messages, with each of those rules assigning a score based on how likely the message is to be spam. Maybe the word "viagra" will give a +4.2 score, while a phrase like "Puff, the magic dragon" would get a -1.3, and a header like "From: mom " will get a -100 (if you've set up SA to whitelist your mom & her email address). The scores assigned by all these rules -- dozens of them by default, and it's easy to add more -- is totalled up to a final score for the message, and that final score, which usually is added to the message headers, represents how confident SA is that a given message is spam. SA by default flags any message with a score over 5 as spam, but sometimes it can be wrong. Using a higher value -- 7 or 10 for example -- will be more cautious, flagging only the really obvious spam and producing very few false positives, but also allowing a few spams ('false negatives') through. On the other hand, if you really hate spam and can tolerate legit mail being flagged as spam (note: most people don't want to lose any of their legit mail, but some don't care), then you can set the threshold really low -- 2 or 1 -- and almost none of your spam will get past SA. So, if your ISP is running SpamAssassin, and they haven't provided a FAQ for how to configure popular mail clients to use their SA data (and if they didn't, shame on them!), you may need to look over the headers that your incoming mail include. It will often be X-Spam-Flag: YES, but not always. You may prefer to look at the X-Spam-Score: header, and decide for yourself if you agree with your ISP's results -- maybe you want to use a higher or lower score than they do, for example. I'm not sure if Mail.app can put simple arithmatic in filters, so if you want to say that the X-Spam-Score: header must have a value greater than or equal to 6.0 before flagging it as junk mail, you may have to do something silly like a series of rules looking for X-Spam-Score: begins with 6, X-Spam-Score: begins with 7, X-Spam-Score: begins with 8, X-Spam-Score: begins with 9, X-Spam-Score: begins with 10, X-Spam-Score: begins with 11, etc. There's hopefully a better way than that, but I'm not normally a Mail.app user, so I forget what the filters allow you to do. Under the version on this 10.2 machine, it doesn't look like there's a way to get any closer than "begins with", which could be annoying to figure out how to do right. As an alternative, there's always Fetchmail & Procmail :-) ---
Get Mail to use ISP's non-standard spam headers
The preferred way to filter for a SpamAssassin score greater than 6.0 is to use the X-Spam-Level header. Use "X-Spam-Level contains ******".
Get Mail to use ISP's non-standard spam headers
Peter Teichman wrote: The preferred way to filter for a SpamAssassin score greater than 6.0 is to use the X-Spam-Level header. Use "X-Spam-Level contains ******".
Isn't this effectively 'greater than or equal to 6..? (and if not why not) . To strictly get greater than 6, you'd need to screen for "*******" (7 asterix)
Get Mail to use ISP's non-standard spam headers
Interesting info about looking for spam information coming from the provider. I thought I'd check my mail coming in on my Speakeasy.net account. Looks like they do have some type of "non standard" ;) spam filtering in use. It looks like they use a product called Amika Guardian (headers look like this: "X-Amikaguardian....". I used google to find out some more about the company but couldn't really find any good information about what their filtering give us or how I can use it. I do notice that some of my messages get a Junk Mail or Spam rating it looks like. Who knows, maybe that could be used in some kind of filtering within Mail. Anyone familiar with this? |
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