Spam / SpamAssassin --Enabled By Default?

[stuzbot]

Well, I’ve finally migrated my epic Google Mail archives over to MIAB. About 7 or 8GB in total across 3 or 4 accounts. All seems to be working OK so far [touch wood!] but, as expected, I’m getting lots of spam again as I’m effectively starting from ground zero with this new server. Now, this is probably a dumb question but I’ve read through the docs and can’t find anything about it:

Is SpamAssassin configure/enabled by default in a MIAB setup, or do I have to install/enable it via a plugin? I’ve been moving spam emails to my Junk folder as, from what I’ve read on here, that seems to be the way to train SpamAssassin. But I thought I’d better make sure it was actually installed and enabled in the first place!

[stylnchris]

Spam assassin is enabled by default and I too noticed how decent gmails spam collection is in comparison to spam assassin. I did move some mails over to junk and it seems like leaving them there did somehow train spam assassin but it does take awhile.

Gmails spam filtering was just way better.

Also, If you haven’t already I do recommend looking at —>

How to use Postgrey client whitelists

The Postfix Greylisting Policy Server (Postgrey) uses the concept of greylisting to take advantage of mail standards that the vast majority of spammers are not or cannot be configured to support. The postfix process is configured to send incoming mail to postgrey, which determines whether the mail can continue to the next step in the delivery process by checking whether the sender (“client”) or recipient match anything postgrey is configured to match. When the postgrey test fails, postfix will…

This will ensure mail you want to receive quickly doesn’t get caught up with postgrey.

[stuzbot]

Thanks for the info.

The greylisting did catch me out at first, when I set up my MIAB and found I could send between accounts on the box but nothing would come in from outside…

…until, of course, ten minutes passed and they all arrived at once.

[stylnchris]

Where I found this to be the most annoying is when a website is sending you a two factor authentication to your email and the mail arrives 10 minutes late due to gray listing — it doesn’t work because the token expires before you can get the mail to enter into the website.

[stuzbot]

Another question about spam:

if I mark an email as spam in my desktop or phone email client, does this information get synced via IMAP too, so that it gets added to SpamAssassin’s training data?.. or does it only work if I actually move an email to Spam on the server via the Roundcube webmail?

[latinhypercube]

The sa-learn routine is triggered when an email is moved into the spam folder. Assuming your mail client does that then there is nothing else to do.

sa-learn is also triggered if you move a mail to the inbox which you will therefore want to do if you find good mail in your spam folder.

Since the spam assassin learning routine is triggered on individual email moves, there is no need to keep mail in your spam folder so you can delete that when you want.

[stuzbot]

Cheers for the info.