send spam to alternate email address

[dansroka]

The trick to automatically delete email that spamassassin has tagged as spam has been well documented: http://forums.westhost.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1204

But as a relative newbie, I stumbled on an alternative to this that I haven't found mentioned before. It is probably obvious to the more-knowledgeable, but it wasn't to me ops: so I thought I'd pass it on.

I didn't want my spam deleted -- I wanted it sent to a special mailbox that I reserve just for spam. This way, I can easily review the email using IMP or NeoMail for false-positives. So, I first created a new email account, called bulkmail. Then, following the procmail instructions followed above, I redirected the spam to this directory.

So instead of adding this to procmailrc:

:0:  
 * ^X-Spam-Flag: YES  
 /dev/null

you add:

:0:  
 * ^X-Spam-Flag: YES  
/var/spool/mail/bulkmail

Now I just log in to my bulkmail@mydomain.com email, and I can review the spam, forward non-spam, etc. This was a big help when I was on the road, and using IMP to check my mail. I get some 100+ spam a day, so within a few days, my inbox was overloaded with mail that Spam Assassin already tagged. This way, it is all forwarded to my bulkmail address for checking on later.

Dan

[FZ]

Procmail never ceases to amaze This is a very good alternative to deleting spam mail and to moving it to mailboxes that are only accessible via SSH and Pine (e.g. /mail/possible_spam). Thanks for posting this. I'm going to refer it to someone I had initially set up with the move-spam-to-Pine-accessible-folder solution. This would be much easier for him to use.

[dansroka]

Hey, for all the help I've gotten on these boards, I'm glad I can pay some back!

[timvdh]

This looks very nice.
But I have not figured out how I can acces the mails (using IMP like you suggest) that I send to /var/spool/mail/bulkmail ? I see they are delivered there in that file, but I have no idea how to access it.
Have just spent a day learning the basics of procmail and spamassassin and my head is spinning around :roll:

[wildjokerdesign]

This looks very nice.
But I have not figured out how I can acces the mails (using IMP like you suggest) that I send to /var/spool/mail/bulkmail ? I see they are delivered there in that file, but I have no idea how to access it.
Have just spent a day learning the basics of procmail and spamassassin and my head is spinning around :roll:

If you have set up bulkmail as an email/ftp account you should be able to access it either via your email program or using the browser webmail( like neomail). In your email program you would create an account like your main one but you would use bulkmail@yourdomain.com for the username and then the password you set for that account. If you access if via browser webmail then you would simply use bulkmail as the username and then the password.

[timvdh]

Thanks for the help,
It works nows!