I'm definitely using Spamblocker 4 but as far as I can tell, its not doing bayesian or any kind of statistical calculations based on body content. Spamblocker seems to give Exim the equivalent of what Postfix gives me out of the box with minor tweaks.
SpamBlocker blocks based on certain behaviours and reputation. It's not designed to do any body checking; that can be done easily after email is accepted, by SpamAssassin.
I understand that you (and others) may want email bodies to be checked before email is accepted. There are several reasons why I didn't take this approach:
In my experience, I get such a small amount of email caught by SpamAssassin after using SpamBlocker that I didn't see the reason to put up with the overhead involved in checking bodies at receipt time.
Many senders don't understand a block after the body is accepted, and go ahead and retry the email later, over and over again, creating an even higher overhead. This less true than it was in the past; most spam is now sent by spambots, and generally they never retry. But this was part of my original decision.
SpamAssassin does it's job well, and in the DirectAdmin configuration, doesn't attempt to send back email to any senders, so it can't send email back to the wrong senders.
So, if I decide to take this approach, it won't be to fill my own need, but rather to create a product for others.
This product would run a SpamAssassin configuration, tweakable by you, but otherwise standard. You'd not be able to use most of the current SpamAssassin settings in DirectAdmin because except for the trigger value for blocking, they wouldn't make sense.
This product would not be a commercial product because it would use the exim.conf file, which couldn't be encrypted, and because exim is published under the GPL, must be open-source in any event.
So my interest in doing this would be based on advance subscription, with every subscriber understanding that once it's done, anyone would be able to use it, whether they subscribed or not.
Or I suppose I could open up a
donations page for SpamBlocker, and see if there were enough donors now to pay for my time.
Or of course you could do it yourself, or find someone else who wanted it badly enough to do it.
My SpamBlocker exim.conf files (all versions) are all covered under the GPL, Version 2, so you can take anything I've done and add to it, or modify it.
As for filtering, DirectAdmin does not do it. I'm not sure what you are talking about but please enlighten me on how to have DirectAdmin filter (not spam filter) mailing lists and such so that imap users have everything nicely sorted into folders.
DirectAdmin uses both a system filter file and a perl file as part of it's exim configuration. In the
SpamBlocker Version 4 exim.conf file for DirectAdmin see both
Edit#4 and
Edit#5. You can use these to do almost anything you might want.
Again, I've not had the need, and so I haven't written additional hooks into my files, but you, or others, most certainly can.
I have a lot of blackberry customers that want their mail nicely sorted. They want to be able to sort into folders based on To/From address, Subject, and Body content. Gmail can do it. Why not DirectAdmin?
GMail isn't an MTA (
mail transfer agent [wikipedia.org]); it's an MUA (
mail user agent [wikipedia.org]). Specifically a web-based MUA. DirectAdmin offers several of those, including Squirrel, AtMail, and others. And you can install any others. Some of these include filtering capability which can move emails into specific folders, and once they've been moved, they can be used by other imap-based programs. Alternatively, a desktop-based or laptop-based imap client can do the same. And once it's done, of course your blackberry could take advantage of it as well.
If your clients need more sophistication than that, of course you can offer them a premium email solution, as we do for our email clients who need it.
Further discussion is encouraged.
Jeff
