My Internet host, Hosting Matters, is rolling out a new anti-spam system to its various servers, and it finally got to mine.
The new system, MailScanner, still uses the SpamAssassin engine, but the option to flag subject lines of spam messages (as detected) has gone away (it’s a server-based setting, not an account-based setting, and evidently a huge majority of HM users prefer not to see the subject line marked up). Problem is, a lot of mailers (like Outlook Express) can’t read the alternative mail header flags.
MailScanner has two threshold (configurable to a SpamAssassin score) — “low scoring spam” and “high scoring spam.” Mail falling into either of those categories can be set to be delivered, deleted, or routed to a particular e-mail address.
Now, with Thunderbird, I can set a Message Filter to look for a X-HMDNSGroup-MailScanner-SpamScore message header value that contains “ssssssssssss” or something. But what makes this dicey is that I also provide mail hosting to my folks, Margie’s folks, and Mary, and OE users (the Ks) can’t do message header filtering, and I have no idea if it’s possible in my folks’ or Mary’s e-mail clients.
Sigh.
What I will likely do is monitor what flows into my account with that flag, and look for false positives, then play with the settings some more, until I can confidently just have stuff flagged as spam deleted. Either that, or the HM folks have said they’re looking at a per-account subject line flagger that I’d be more than happy to go back to using.
Meantime, the new system also has anti-virus cleaning and some nice anti-phishing/fraud features that I consider a plus. Yay.