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:

• 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

• man spamassassin-setup
• man spamassassin-usage
• man sa-learn (note IST disabled this interface on mailservices.uwaterloo.ca - last checked 9 July 2005)
• IST Mail Services main page
• Overviews of IST Mail Filtering CLuster
• IST SPAM overview and configuration

Updating your settings on the IST cluster

• IST Copy and Paste user_prefs
• IST File upload user_pefs
  • Note: In CS enter mail.cs.uwaterloo.ca for the mailserver for the previous two links

IST rejected email

• https://mailservices.uwaterloo.ca/spam/rejected.html

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