If your Niksula account was created after September 2012, you don’t have a Niksula mailbox and thus this guide does not apply to you.
The Niksula mail server uses Sieve (RFC 5228) upon mail delivery to decide what to do with it. The sieve script the system looks at is ~/.dovecot.sieve
for each user. You can edit this file using your favorite text editor and then syntax-check your edits by compiling the file with sievec(1)
, eg. by running sievec ~/.dovecot.sieve
. This is automatically done on mail delivery if required, and if any errors occur, mail is delivered to INBOX and error messages appended to ~/.dovecot.sieve.log
. Additionally, to test that your script works correctly, you can use sieve-test(1)
.
procmail
is no longer supported in Niksula - having a .procmailrc
does nothing.
Before Sieve scripts are consulted, SpamAssassin is automatically run on all mail delivered to Niksula mailboxes. It tries to detect spam by doing various tests. Found spam is tagged with specified headers. For more details see spamassassin(1)
.
For more information about Sieve see http://sieve.info/
. In Niksula, the Sieve implementation in use is dovecot-pigeonhole, so it supports some extensions (those not enabled by default are not enabled in Niksula either).
We’ll now show you examples on how to use Sieve in combination with SpamAssassin in Niksula to filter spam.
Since incoming mail is automatically tagged for you, all you need to do is create Sieve rules to handle it.
All incoming mail to Niksula are tagged with some default settings. Therefore, to put spam messages in a different mailbox as it arrives, all you have to do is to add the following lines to your ~/.dovecot.sieve
script.
require ["fileinto"];
if header :is "X-Spam-Flag" "YES" {
fileinto "spam"; # or whatever mailbox name you wish
stop; # don't continue processing for this message
}
This example shows how to use some personal SpamAssassin settings. Different users get different kind spam so default settings can’t be the best for everyone.
As in the above example, add the required lines to file spam into a mailbox of your choosing. To do some personal configuration edit ~/.spamassassin/user_prefs
.
You can set lots of variables to suit better for your own mails. The default required score for spam is 5.0. If you still get spam with scores like 4.5 or something, you can set the limit lower (or perhaps tune the scores assigned to certain rules).
required_score 4.0
And now also the spams with scores higher than 4.0 go to your spam folder.
See Mail::SpamAssassin::Conf POD documentation for details of what can be tweaked.
Even though SpamAssassin has very good rule-based filters, sometimes even those are not enough. Some people might get even hundreds of spams per day so it is very annoying. SpamAssassin includes a Bayesian module that learns from your emails which ones are spam and which ones are good (ham, ie. non-spam).
Now you should make two mailboxes of training material, ie. spam and ham. By default SpamAssassin will not apply Bayesian filtering until it has learned 200 messages of both types (but this is configurable with the options bayes_min_ham_num
and bayes_min_spam_num
). Make sure that only good mails are in the ham collection, and the spam collection contains only spam.
Once you have a mailbox full of spam and another one full of ham, ssh to some machine in Paniikki or kekkonen, and run sa-learn on your mail. This may take some time so it is nice to use command ‘nice’. Your mail is stored in ~/Maildir
and is organized in the filesystem in Maildir++ format, so if your mailboxes are called ‘spambox’ and ‘hambox’, run the following commands:
nice sa-learn --showdots --spam ~/Maildir/.spambox/
nice sa-learn --showdots --ham ~/Maildir/.hambox/
Bayesian filtering is enabled by default in Niksula (may be controlled by the setting use_bayes
in ~/.spamassassin/user_prefs
), but autolearning is disabled so you need to train the filter yourself.
You can test that the new filter is working by checking the X-Spam-Status headers of emails that you receive; SpamAssassin tests that look like BAYES_00
should be visible even in ordinary emails.
And for reminder: No system is foolproof, so please check your spamfolder frequently.