Robby Balona wrote:
> 
> I have Exim purring away and doing well and Spamasassin seems to work nicely
> to. I would like to drop or quarantine mails marked as spam by Spamasassin .
> I know all the arguments about doing this but I would like to block the spam
> never the less.

Magnus has already put you on the right path to how to do what you want. 
You should give a bit of thought to what you want to do here, because 
I'm not sure what exactly you're trying to accomplish.

There's a handful of different things you can do with spam once you've 
identified it; some are better than others. Exim can be configured to 
implement all of them, so you have to decide which you want to do 
according to your own local policy:

- Reject the spam in the SMTP conversation, using a "drop" or "deny" acl 
verb; this is the best thing to do when the spamassassin score is high, 
because for legitimate false positives, the sender will get a bounce 
from their own mail server, but for spam with fake headers, the spamware 
will usually just ignore the rejection message

- Blackhole the spam, telling the sender that you've accepted it, but 
not delivering it anywhere. This is widely considered to be a bad thing 
to do, because no-one on either end knows that the message wasn't 
delivered, so it's impossible to find false positives.

- Quarantine the spam; accept it at SMTP time, but deliver it to a 
quarantine instead of the recipients normal mailbox (using a router and 
transport in the config). This is a good thing to do with spam that 
scores between two thresholds, but only if someone's checking the 
quarantine on a regular basis, otherwise it's no different than a blackhole

- Mark the spam; accept it at SMTP time, but mark it in some way (either 
with X-Spam* headers like you are currently doing, or with a tag added 
to the subject header). It's then up to the users' MUA to filter the 
spam however they like.

- Bounce the spam; accept it at SMTP time, and then promptly reject it 
in a router. This is universally reviled as stupid and bad for the 
internet, as it generates bounce messages to faked senders (collateral 
spam). I'm only including it in the list for completeness; don't do this!

I think if you poll most people here and in other MTA admin communities, 
you'll find that best practice is to reject above a certain score 
threshold, and then either quarantine or mark messages that fall in a 
lower score range where it's probably spam, but you can't be certain.

- Marc


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