How to setup spamassassin and how to use mailservices.uwaterloo.ca for your spam processing

  • When you received a message sent directly to a real address like userid@cs.uwaterloo.ca the message skips mailservices.uwaterloo.ca spam processing
  • You can arrange for all your spam filtering to be run on mailservices.uwaterloo.ca by following the steps outlined here

Why?

  • The method offloads the heaviest part of spam filtering from machines that do not have enough processing power or disk space to handle heavy loads.
  • Leverages a centrally maintained server for all spam processing

How?

  • First, if you have not yet set up spamassassin, run the script spamassassin-setup
    Note you can run the command on the cpu*.cs machines on the CS environment, since they share the same file space as both the IMAP server, mail.cs.uwaterloo.ca, and the incoming mail server, mx100.cs.uwaterloo.ca
  • If you have an existing spamassassin user preferences file (~/.spamassassin/user_prefs) or you have changes you can use these links to make updates

Example:

~/.procmailrc that uses:
  • MAILDIR=${HOME}/Mail
  • LOGFILE=${HOME}/procmail.log
# tag messages resembling spam (assumes 'spamd' is running)
:0fw
| /software/spamassassin/bin/spamc -d mailservices.uwaterloo.ca
 
# If you want messages marked as spam placed in $MAILDIR)/junk
# uncomment the next three lines
#:0:
#* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
#junk
 
# Everything else goes to its normal mailbox
:0:
${DEFAULT}

Summary (after the changes are made):

  • If someone sends email to userid@uwaterloo.ca the mailservices.uwaterloo.ca cluster will process your email before your mail server sees it
  • If someone sends email to userid@host.uwaterloo.ca then your local .procmailrc file will process it through mailservices.uwaterloo.ca
  • Note: if mailservices.uwaterloo.ca processes it first then spamd will not have to do any more work once it ends up on your mail server
  • If you want to update your user_prefs file just make edits to your local file and re-upload it using these links

References

Updating your settings on the IST cluster

IST rejected email

If your inbound messages are being rejected by IST you can check this link

-- MikeGore - 16 July 2004, LawrenceFolland - 25 Nov 2004

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Topic revision: r14 - 2013-10-01 - AdrianPepper
 
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