[auton-users] SPAM filtering in SCS

[Dan Pelleg]

This is not directly related to AUTON stuff, but it is a little-known
method to save yourself some time.

If you receive your mail in SCS, then you can make use of the spam filter
installed (but not normally activated) to label messages which are, with
high probability, spam.

Here's how:

Edit the file .maildelivery in your AFS home directory. Assuming your
username is bovik, add these lines:

# file tagged spam in my regular mail spool
addr bovik+spam > ? /usr/spool/mail/bovik
# tag spam and resend to bovik+spam
* - | ? /usr/local/bin/spamassassin-maildelivery -S bovik+spam at cs.cmu.edu
# send zephyr notices only for nonspam
default - | R  /usr/local/bin/zrcvalert $(size)



(If you don't care about zephyr email notifications, don't worry about the
last two lines).


Now, on your maildrop machine (ux7 or ux11 or whatever shows up under
"Forwarding bovik as" when you do a "finger bovik at cs.cmu.edu"), run this:
spamassassin -t < /dev/null

(it might take a while, just let it finish)..

That's it! What this will do is put the string "***** SPAM *****" in
subject lines of messages it classifies as such. It has a fairly low
false-positive and false-negative rates. But you can add blacklists and
whitelists in the file .spamassassin/user_prefs to refine it.

You can also do more interesting things with the flagged mail - file it in
a folder you only read occasionally, forward it (or the unflagged mail) to
an external mailbox, or simply discard it.