RE: SCL Header?

[Cassandra Brockett]

As much as I hate to admit it... I'm a user who runs Exchange behind
SA... But considering I'm doing that to make SURE the Exchange server
has no direct inbound connectivity from outside, which is necessary
given M$'s horrible performance on the security front, I consider it a
necessary evil... And it's mostly because Exchange is a necessary evil
for it's integration (*wishes she could code more as she'd help write a
real replacement for free-software*)...

Considering the number of random options starting to come in for SA
Milter... I'd suggest one primary improvement first - Config file.  Put
together a config file and then make the only majorly used command line
option be the config file location switch (as each different distro
chooses it's own location, but given the way most work if it sat
somewhere in /etc it should never need "moving" but *shrug* I'm sure
someone will want to move it).

That way also only the highly-used commands would need command line
switches, and everything else could sit in the config file.  For
instance in this sort of thing, I'd stick something like --spam-header
on the command line to activate the header itself, but have the config
file list the header in more detail.  That way people can put in the
config file something along the lines of:-
SA_Spam_Header="X-Spam-SCL=%s"

(or whatever, I haven't looked at what Exchange "wants" all that much),
and there could be a list of variables that people could use that would
add the various data to the header.  Then later add another series of
options for the spam scores along the lines of:-
SA_Header_Score_0=-1
...
SA_Header_Score_9=15

That would make the config more human readable, and when diagnosing mail
problems for users, the simpler it is to understand the configuration,
the easier it becomes... And I'm mega-lazy :-)

Anyhow, that's just my two-cents on the matter, I'd suggest getting the
config file out as the first step as there are many options to the
milter now and while not everyone will want even half the options, those
who do use quite a few options will be breathing easier if they know
they just need to modify the config file from here on and not have to
worry about the command line, or even worse, command line maximum
lengths *twitch*...

--
Cassandra


-----Original Message-----
From: address@hidden
[mailto:address@hidden On
Behalf Of Dan O'Brien
Sent: Monday, August 14, 2006 5:34 AM
To: address@hidden
Subject: SCL Header?


Much as it pains me to admit it, several of my clients are running MS
Exchange servers behind their SpamAssassin mail filtering servers.  MS
Exchange SP2 has "'Intelligent' Message Filtering" (which relies on
another package to evaluate messages for spam-ness, but that's a topic
for another disucssion).  An administrator can route a message to a
user's Junk Mail folder based on the value found in the X-Spam-SCL SMTP
header (an integer between 0 and 9, with higher values indicating a
greater confidence that the message is spam). 

I'd like to open discussion about the possibility that SpamAss-milter be
enhanced to add an X-Spam-SCL header, based on the results of
spamassassin's evaluation, as follows: 

+ A new option, "-s [Header Name]" to enable the addition the X-Spam-SCL
header 

+ The "simple" implementation would be to assign the header value to 9
if SA tags as spam and 0 if it doesn't. 

+ Additional granularity could be achieved with another option "-S
[comma separated list of SA scores]", so that you can configure the
correlation between SCL values and SA scores.  For example, -S
-1,0.5,1.0,2.0,2.5,3.0,4.5,5.0,10.0,15.0 would mean that an SA score of
-1.0 or less would have an SCL of zero, a score >-1 and <0.5 would have
an SCL of 1, and so on up to messages scoring >= 15.0 would have an SCL
of 9.  (I don't know if these numbers make sense in the real world, but
you get the idea.) 

Any fellow 'milter users have thoughts on this idea? 

Dan 


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