Slider functions for spam control?

Support
1

Just a quick question on the spam control sliders in the Email section of the web interface. They’re listed as a ‘threshold’ control. Do you move to the right or to the left to reject more of the spam mail? Couldn’t find anything specific about this in the install documentation. I get hundreds of spam mails per day on my domain, and I need to tighten up the filters to reject more of these. Thanks!

Dave Land
Land Computer Service

2

Hi @xmechanic, my settings here are 5 and 9:

The higher are the values, the greater is the filter tolerance.

The values refer to the SpamAssassin scores required to trigger an action.

  • The first threshold considers the message spam, adds subject prefix , moves to junkmail folder;
  • the second rejects the message from the remote server.

See also: http://docs.nethserver.org/en/latest/mail.html#anti-spam

3

In other words the lower the value, the more likely SpamAssassin would be to reject the mail for spam? (e.g. move controls to the left for tighter filtering?) Thanks for the reply Davide! :wink:

4

affirmative :+1:

…Be careful of false positives

5

Spam scores are adjusted using a big corpus of emails, I suggest values not lower than 5, which is the default SpamAssassin score.

6

Probably a good idea, yes. Like Davide mentioned, I may start getting false positives on people I actually WANT to get mail from. :wink:

7

I think @xmechanic has raised an interesting question about the sliders, maybe they aren’t immediatly clear.

I suppose that a minus sign on the left edge and a plus sign on the right edge could help to understand on the fly the threshold or, even better, a couple of labels such as: “low” “high” for the first slider and “allow” “deny” for the second one.

What do you think?

8

That would be much better! Great idea. :wink:

Dave Land
Land Computer Service

Incidentally, @davidep I set my sliders to 5 and 8.8, and already a BIG difference in the junkmail! Thanks.

9

Also, if I want to receive all spam (i.e ignoring the Deny threshold) I can’t, as the maximum value is 19.9 (I’d like to have 9999).

10

I’d go further: use pre-defined discrete steps.

As the scoring rules are tuned by Spamassassin around 5 and 9, why not set some (arbitrary) fixed values?

“Spam threshold” becomes “Mark as spam”. For instance

4 = sensible, 5 = normal, 7.5 = tolerant

“Deny message”

8 = sensible, 9 = normal, 12 = tolerant, 9999 = off

For the experienced sysadmin, thresholds could be still set at custom values from the console, with config setprop... command.

11

I like it. 5 steps could be enough.
I have all my systems set to mark=5 and block=10 or 15.

12

Agreed, simplicity is powerful.

13

Yes @davidep is exactly what I have in mind last night but my hands have typed bad on the keyboard :wink: