Topic: Spamtrap - Is it possible to feed SpamBayes / SpamAssassin

[Paul Howard]

Spammers send junk to a couple of users who are not on our system, never have been and never will be. Out of interest I created the accounts to see what type of spam was coming through and there were quite a few messages not been classified as spam.

I did manually transfer the offending emails to the LearnAsSpam folder for a while before giving up as I didn't have the time to manually do it on a regular basis. It has occured to me since the accounts don't actually exist for usuage (and never will be needed) they might be able to be put to use as spamtraps to feed spambayes automatically. This would help maintain spambayes as some of our users still delete spam that reaches their inbox instead of transferring the email into the learnasspam folder. You tell them but do they listen...

So is there anyway of setting up an email account to receive mail but pass any messages not classifed as spam to spambayes or the LearnAsSpam folder? I am after an automatic solution which I can setup and forget about while it does it's job.


 

[janet]

Paul Howard

sme is designed to not accept mail sent to invalid users, just let it do it's job.
Why would you want to play around with mail sent to people who don't even exist ?

I think the reasoning behind your "automatic spam detection" idea is flawed.
If you setup mailrules or similar to redirect all mail (for the now valid but non existent user) to the LearnAsSpam or similar folder, then even legitimate type mail from legitimate senders will gradually get identified as spam, which will impact upon mail sent to all other valid users. Result is that users will start to see more and more legitimate mail being identified as spam and moved to the junkmail folder.