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Reject mail at SMTP time if the spam score is greater than this number.

Posted: 25 May 2023, 05:01
by bloatedstoat
Is there a setting within Mailscanner that allows for the rejection of mail at SMTP time when the score exceeds a predefined threshold?

This feature exists within the Exim Configuration Manager although I have not enabled it as the advice is not to tinker with Spamassassin settings when Mailscanner is installed. We have this feature running on an old server and it works really well.

As such can I:

1) Enable this setting in Exim and set a score and have the feature honour it by rejecting high scoring spam without any side effects?
2) Configure some other way globally within the Mailscanner configuration to reject spam globally at SMTP time if a predefined score is broken.

Thank you.

Re: Reject mail at SMTP time if the spam score is greater than this number.

Posted: 25 May 2023, 09:17
by Sarah
This cannot be done within MailScanner. Exim processes the mail (and does any RBL checking, etc.) before it passes it to MailScanner. So there is no way to configure anything to be done at SMTP time in Mailscanner. You could try enabling spamassassin in cpanel and running that alongside MailScanner if you have plenty of server resources. Then you could use the spamassassin related settings in exim. We would not recommend or support that and would not be able to assist with any issues that may arise. The main problem would be higher resource usage since you would be scanning twice with spamassassin, and a second possible issue would be confusion over which instance of spamassassin is causing any problems with individual email scores (i.e. false positives or negatives). But if you really need to reject mail at smtp on the basis of spam scores and don't want to stop using mailscanner, that is the only way to do it.

Regards,

Sarah
configserver.com

Re: Reject mail at SMTP time if the spam score is greater than this number.

Posted: 26 May 2023, 03:59
by bloatedstoat
Thanks for the explanation Sarah, appreciated.