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Help Documents: PEP

SpamAssassin

SpamAssassin is a third party application that is used by many ISPs to filter mail. It works by analyzing both the headers and the body of a mail message and calculating a numeric score. The higher this score, the more likely it is to be spam.

PEP can pass a message to SpamAssassin for analysis and extract the score value, which you can test in the normal PEP fashion. Unlike most SpamAssassin installations, PEP allows each of our customers to choose whether or not they want to use it, and more importantly how they want to use it. You might choose to delete high scoring messages, bounce them, challenge them, etc.

Using SpamAssassin is as easy as any other PEP rule. You simply need to test the sascore "header" value. The first time you reference this value, the message is analyzed by SpamAssassin and the resulting score is extracted and remembered. Any subsequent references to "sascore" will not cause it to be processed again.

The default SpamAssassin score threshold is 5.00 - scores higher than this are very likely to be spam while lower scores are unlikely to be spam. As with any spam identification mechanism, "your mileage may vary".

Examples

This example simply deletes all messages that score higher than 5.00:

delete if sascore > 5.00

Instead of deleting such messages, you might prefer to insert the score into the message as a header (in this example we'll insert a header named X-SpamAssassin: that contains the score value):
insert if sascore > 0 X-SpamAssassin {sascore}