Spamassassin Quickstart for whoopis.com Users

Intro: This is for users who wish to configure their email accounts on whoopis.com (or on another domain hosted on the whoopis.com server) to flag spam for easy filtering later. This is just a "what to type" recipe, culled from Bill Stearns's excellent and comprehensive Spamassassin Intro, Setup, and Advanced Techniques document. Please at least skim that, before you implement this recipe.

See the Unix man pages for spamassassin here.

1. Log in to your account via ssh.
   See the Unix man pages for ssh here.
2. Copy and paste the following block of text into your terminal window:

   mkdir .spamassassin
   cd .spamassassin
   cp -p /usr/share/spamassassin/user_prefs.template user_prefs
   cat <<EOF >>user_prefs 
   rewrite_header Subject ****SPAM****
   report_header 1
   use_terse_report 1
   defang_mime 0
   report_safe 0
   use_bayes 1
   auto_learn 1
   ok_locales en
   EOF
   cd
   mkdir .procmail
   touch .procmail/proclog
   touch .procmailrc
   cat <<EOF >>.procmailrc
   SHELL=/bin/sh
   PATH=/bin:/usr/bin
   PMDIR=$HOME/.procmail
   LOGABSTRACT=all
   MAILDIR=$HOME/mail       #you'd better make sure it exists
   LOGFILE=$PMDIR/proclog   #recommended
   VERBOSE=off
   
   #Spamassassin start
   :0fw: spamassassin.lock
   | /usr/bin/spamc
   #Spamassassin end
   EOF
   

   Hit return once after you paste all that, just to be sure.

3. If you want your mail to be forwarded to a different email address, type this in as well BUT change "user.name@domain.com" to the email address that you want your mail forwarded to:

   cd
   cat <<EOF >>.procmailrc
   
   # Forwarding section start
   :0
   ! user.name@domain.com
   # Forwarding section end
   EOF
   

   
   See the Unix man pages for procmail here.

4. If you don't already have a "mail" directory, also type:

   mkdir mail
   

5. If you have a .forward file, remove or rename it.

• If you are a whoopis.com IMAP mail user, and you want to have spam auto-filtered into a folder every X hours, please refer to this part of Bill's howto.
• If you read your mail directly on whoopis (e.g., using pine), please refer to the "Procmail Setup" section of Bill's howto.

  
  See the Unix man pages for procmail here.

• If you have no idea what either of those things mean, ignore them.

Get Euro-style oval stickers for Geeks!

NEW -- the "magic/more magic" light switch cover!
Click here for the story.

References:

• http://www.stearns.org/doc/spamassassin-setup.current.html
• http://www.trilug.org/pipermail/trilug/Week-of-Mon-20030113/013583.html (how to do forwarding with procmail; thanks, Jon!)