Spam Control at CCRMA

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Welcome to CCRMA's Spam fighter homepage.

Having a 'Spam Free' inbox is a requires vigilence on everyone's part. In the text below, we'll describe what you can do to minimize your Spam.

First you need to determine which email client you will be using (e.g. Evolution, Thunderbird, WebMail, or Pine). Spam fighting is much more difficult if you use more than one email client. The descriptions below are for exclusive use of only one client. These solutions also assume that you will not be using client side 'intelligent email filtering' (where the your email client 'learns' about Junk mail).

.procmailrc File

This file is key in your Spam control effort. It is a hidden or 'dot' file, located in your home directory. You will need to create this file, see below for details on how to do this. .procmailrc gives Sendmail [1] instructions on where to route your email once it arrives at CCRMA. The idea is to make Sendmail route email through SpamAssassin [2] before it gets to your client inbox.

SpamAssassin will run each email through its filter (filter rules are updated frequently to reflect new spam 'threats'). SpamAssassin will add several lines to your email header's, including: X-Spam-Level, X-Spam-Checker-Version, X-Spam-Status, and X-Spam-Report. For now, let's concentrate on X-Spam-Level since it is on this line, that you will create filter's in your email client.

# directory where mailboxes are located
# this is the default used by pine
MAILDIR=$HOME

# pipe the message through spamassassin in cm-home
:0fw
| spamc -d 171.64.197.138

At a minumum, this text in the .procmailrc file will direct your mail to SpamAssassin, which will than tag (add lines to) each email header reflecting its likelyhood of being spam (the header line X-Spam-Level). X-Spam-Level display's Spam Level using the asterisk. For example, for 'Spam Level 15':

X-Spam-Level: ***************

The idea then, is to establish email filter's in your email client which direct these messages into more manageable folder's or to delete the message, outright.