NAME The dovecot antispam pugin. DESCRIPTION The dovecot antispam plugin watches a defined spam folder (defaults to "SPAM"). It works together with a spam system that classifies each message as it is delivered. When the message is classified as spam, it shall be delivered to the spam folder, otherwise via the regular filtering file the user may have (maildrop, sieve, ...). Now the user has everything classified as spam in the special spam folder, everything else where it should be sorted to. This is not enough because our spam scanner needs training. We'll occasionally have false positives and false negatives. Now this is the point where the dovecot antispam plugin comes into play. Instead of moving mail into special folders or forwarding them to special mail addresses for retraining, the plugin offers two actions for the user: 1. moving mail out of the SPAM folder and 2. moving mail into the SPAM folder. The dovecot plugin watches these actions (and additionally prohibits APPENDs to the SPAM folder, more for technical reasons than others) and tells the spam classifier that it made an error and needs to re-classify the message (as spam/not spam depending on which way it was moved.) The advantage of this approach is that the mail ends up in the right target folder directly and needs not be touched twice. When other classifiers like crm114 that have an 'unsure' state are used, the plugin can also help, it supports an 'unsure' folder feature. The unsure folder cannot be written to, but moving out from there into a folder that is considered a spam folder will learn as spam, any other folder (except trashes) will cause learning as not-spam. INSTALLATION First copy the 'defconfig' file to '.config' and edit it as necessary. You need to have the dovecot headers installed and possibly other things depending on the backend you choose. Then, assuming you have configured the INSTALLDIR correctly, simply run 'make install'. If you do not wish to use the install target, simply copy the plugin (that is, the file lib90_antispam_plugin.so) to your dovecot imap plugin directory; by default this is /usr/lib/dovecot/modules/imap/ or any dir you have configured (look for the mail_plugin_dir configuration directive.) Open your dovecot configuration file (usually /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf) and add the antispam plugin to the imap protocol section: protocol imap { mail_plugins = antispam # mail_plugin_dir = /usr/lib/dovecot/modules/imap } BACKENDS The plugin supports multiple backends, there are currently two working backends included in the distribution: dspam executable backend (dspam specific) This backend instantly retrains by calling dspam. There are some problems with this approach including (1) it can take a long time during which the IMAP session is blocked (2) when many users retrain many messages at once server load may spike email sender backend (spam filter agnostic) This backend sends mail to ham@example.com or spam@example.com (actual addresses are configurable) for retraining. This backend can be very fast to set up if you already have a working setup that uses training addresses as recommended by many spam filter setups. crm114 executable backend (crm114 specific) This backend instantly retrains by calling mailreaver.crm which needs to be configured (defaulting to /bin/false!); the argument --good or --spam is given depending on how mail is moved. You need to use the unsure folder option (see below) together with this plugin and deliver unsure mail into an unsure folder, spam mail into a spam folder and other mail regularly. Has the same drawbacks as the dspam-exec approach. CONFIGURATION Aside from the build-configuration done in the '.config' file, you have the following run-time options (shown along with the default): plugin { ################## # GENERIC OPTIONS # mail signature (used with any backend requiring a signature) antispam_signature = X-DSPAM-Signature # semicolon-separated list of Trash folders (default unset i.e. none) # antispam_trash = # antispam_trash = trash;Trash;Deleted Items # semicolon-separated list of spam folders antispam_spam = SPAM # semicolon-separated list of unsure folders (default unset i.e. none) # antispam_unsure = ########################### # BACKEND SPECIFIC OPTIONS # #=================== # dspam-exec plugin # dspam binary antispam_dspam_binary = /usr/bin/dspam # semicolon-separated list of extra arguments to dspam # (default unset i.e. none) # antispam_dspam_args = # antispam_dspam_args = --user;%u # % expansion done by dovecot # antispam_dspam_args = --mode=teft #===================== # mail sending plugin # temporary directory antispam_mail_tmpdir = /tmp # spam/not-spam addresses (default unset which will give errors) # antispam_mail_spam = # antispam_mail_ham = # sendmail binary antispam_mail_tmpdir = /usr/sbin/sendmail #=================== # crm114-exec plugin # mailreaver binary antispam_crm_binary = /bin/false # antispam_crm_binary = /usr/share/crm114/mailreaver.crm # semicolon-separated list of extra arguments to dspam # (default unset i.e. none) # antispam_crm_args = # antispam_crm_args = --config=/path/to/config # NOTE: you need to set the signature for this backend antispam_signature = X-CRM114-CacheID } AUTHORS Johannes Berg, Frank Cusack, Benedikt Boehm, Andreas Schneider