Configure Exim to SpamAssassin before forwarding

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locateMe

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My searches don't seem to find a definitive answer to this problem which must be very common

Our server hosts web and mail for a large number of users who use AOL and similar ISPs and so we have configured Email Forwarding and Catch-All redirects for them so that email sent to their web domain is sent on to their AOL account etc.

We have the latest version of SpamAssassin working and it filters all email that goes into mailboxes located on the server but it does not filter email that is forwarded. This then causes us a problem with AOL who block us as we appear as the originator of the spam which of course we are not.

Can someone give us an idiots guide on how to configure Exim so that we filter the email before forwarding?

I've researched using procmail but that doesn't seem to be manageable from within DA.

Thanks in advance
 
Are you saying you want to filter outgoing email through SpamAssassin? A bad idea, in my opinion, but I suppose you can rewrite exim.conf to do it.

You can also educate your users to not report mail they receive at AOL, etc., which was forwarded to AOL because of them. For egregious offenders you can disable their ability do forwarding.

You can also check the AOL Postmaster Site for information on whitelisting your servers.

Jeff
 
Yep, it's not exactly outbound mail - but mail received @ their domain name needs to be filtered by Spam Assassin before it is then forwarded onto their 'external' mailbox.

Trying to educate users is an impossible task (especially those that use AOL) and I am sure there must be plenty of other SysAdmins in the same situation.

Frankly is seems like a 'good thing to do' - if the mail was stored locally then we would have the overhead of spam filtering and just to forward and blindly ignore whether it was spam or not does nothing but pass the onus onto the receiving mailboxes. In reality it gets our servers blocked as the originator of spam by many and that then screws up our paying customers.

I guess I'll have to get someone to rewrite exim for us. It would seem like a good thing for DA to offer however.
 
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We discourage our users from forwarding mail to AOL and you should do the same thing if you dont want to get blacklisted by AOL or limited.

Spam forwarded onto AOL is going to get your servers ip blacklisted and or limited guaranteed.
 
Does directadmin not run through SpamAssassin email which is getting forwarded?

If it doesn't, is there any reason why it shouldn't?

Comments please. I can always make the change to exim.conf.

Note that custom exim.conf is a good idea only if you have the staff to maintain it; when we had the weekend problem with the chinese spam that was attacking lots of servers with null senders, we had to devote about 30 man hours to it as quickly as possible to understand the problem and fix it. If you're running a custom exim.conf file, then that becomes your responsibility.

So let's open a dialog about it here and see if you can convince me :).

(And don't forget that by default SpamAssassin is still going to send it on to AOL. It'll be marked as spam, and may be in an attachment, but it's still going to be Spam and AOL is still going to see it as spam.)

Jeff
 
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