blocking spam emails in ispconfig3

[Mitz]

I want to block the emails i see as spam so they no longer go to the inbox of the mail users. I'm the admin of a domain and i've asked the users to forward the spam emails to me, so i can start blocking them.

I tried adding mails to the spamfilter blacklist but it did not solve the problems. Emails still go to the user's inbox with the subject modified with a '[SPAM]' tag.

How can i block the spam and send a reply to sender announcing them they are identified as spam?
Can i use some other spam databases or something to block spam?

[till]

In the mailbox settings, select a spamfilter policy, e.g. normal. Then go to the spamfilter policys and change the score value for the spam tag level2 and the kill level. I recommend that you set spam taglevel2 to e.g. 3.4 and the kill level to e.g. 5.0 You should also enter a subject to mark spam emails that are between taglevel 2 and kill level, e.g. "***SPAM***" so your users can filter them easily in the local mail client.

You should never send a message back to the spam senders, as the sender address of a spam email is faked in 99% so you send spam yourself in this case if you reply on spam emails.

[Mitz]

thanx for the info. I didn't think about the fake reply emails. i'm still new to server management.

i've read about spamassasin that it can use RBL checks (for DNS blacklists). Can i use this, or is it on by default?
how can i add extra spam identification methods for my users?

i've read some guides about how to improve spamassasin, but ispconfig ussually saves settings for modules in some tables in mysql. is it the same for spamassasin, or can i edit the configs in /etc/spamassasin?

is there any guide on how spamassasin can be tweaked with ispconfig?
if i enter a domain (e.g. '@spam.com') in spamfilter blacklist will it see it all mails from @spam.com as spam? does this just mark them as spam, or does this method kill the email?

i know i'm asking alot of questions, but i just want to learn and i did not find a explanation how spamassasin and ispconfig work together.

thank you in advance,
mitz

[till]

Please edit the scores as I recomended above, this will give you already a spam recognition rate of about 95 - 99% without false positives and the spamfilter will get better day by day as it uses auto learning. There is no need to add any further tweaks and rbl's are automatically used. To keep spamassassin up to date, just run regularily the command:

sa-update

and then restart amavisd.

ISPConfig is not using spamassassin directly, it uses amavisd which loads the spamassassin library. For details on amavisd-new, take a look here:

http://www.ijs.si/software/amavisd/

[Mitz]

that was quick

thank you for all the help.
i've set it up as you said.

mitz