Overview

This is where I will be maintaining my the archive of my SpamAssassin customised rules. Please see the Instructions section below on how to use them.

Current version is dated: Thursday, 11th January, 2007

Number of custom rules: 1282

Change Log:

• Added 7 new rules (since 21 August 2006)
• Modified ~20 of rules!
• Details of recent changes:

• This is purely a maintenance release and doesn't significantly change the behaviour of the rules as a whole. Mostly score adjustments to reduce false positiives and to take into account improvements in the base SpamAssassin rules. Some rules have been removed from my rule sets as similar rules have been added to recent versions of SA. All feedback welcomed!

• As always, usual disclaimers apply, but if you have any spam that slips through, then please forward me a copy of the e-mail (with full headers if possible) and I'll be happy to write something to catch it! My spam corpus is pretty consistent these days and I don't see all the spam in the world - help me make my rules better; send me your false negatives! (spam NOT flagged). Similarly if there are rules that consistently trigger on false positives (ham that is flagged as spam) I'd like to know about them too!

• To Do: (same as last time)
  • Edit the "spam_update.sh" script some more to tidy up the output and "modularise" some of the loops etc, to use functions. That way I can reuse code.

  • Might work on a perl version too - would make it possible to gather SpamAssassin and MailScanner's config options and minimise the number of variables needed in my script....need time though

Full change logs:

• Rules change log
• "spam_update.sh" change log

Support and Contact

If you have any problems using these rules please either use my personal e-mail page on my main website, or use my e-mail address which is in every rule file.
Sorry for the hassle, but I really don't like publishing my real e-mail address for spam harvesters. Once I get an enquiry from my personal e-mail page, I can then continue the conversation via e-mail anyway, it's only for initial contact :)

Links to downloads:

• Current Version:
  

  Tar/Gzipped:	custom_rules-20070111.tgz	(aka. "custom_rules-current.tgz")
  MD5 Checksum:	6e739046d5b4392f3d75b89c0313b605	(aka. "custom_rules-current.md5")

  
  
• Older versions:

Tar/Gzipped:	custom_rules-20060821.tgz
MD5 Checksum:	f2a267a7bba44dc084c75cb0bf51f621
Tar/Gzipped:	custom_rules-20060110.tgz
MD5 Checksum:	a6d2f2cf73d354794b73d549cf10373e
Tar/Gzipped:	custom_rules-20051202.tgz
MD5 Checksum:	36841cd7e87ad5721d903cb74bb993fc
Tar/Gzipped:	custom_rules-20050602.tgz
MD5 Checksum:	ef44cad7a3e4e4c6541038706803774e
Tar/Gzipped:	custom_rules-20041101.tgz
MD5 Checksum:	2cd2045d07b55aedd00bde03023a2609

Instructions:

I have designed these rules to be relatively "modular". Each file within the tar ball has a group of related Spamassassin rules. For instance all the rules that filter based on the from address are in the "local_from.cf" file. In any case, there is a description of each file's purpose at the beginning of the file.

To use with SpamAssassin directly:

1. Unpack the tar ball into /etc/mail/spamassassin (you may need to create it first)
2. If you are using spamd, restart it now
3. If you are NOT using spamd, there is no need to do anything else :-)

To use with MailScanner:

1. Create /etc/mail/spamassassin if it doesn't already exist
2. Unpack the tar ball into /etc/mail/spamassassin
3. Add the following to your MailScanner.conf file:
   SpamAssassin Local Rules Dir = /etc/mail/spamassassin
4. Restart MailScanner*
   * As MailScanner routinely restarts itself this may not be necessary unless you want those new rules now!

Resources for MailScanner

The following scripts were written for MailScanner running on FreeBSD or Linux but can be easily modified for basically any *nix. See the scripts themselves for more info. They are heavily commented so make sure you read them - you have been warned! If you find any bugs, or modify these scripts to work with your flavour of *nix, I'd be happy to hear from you and host them here with due credit etc. See previous section about how to contact me :-) Also if you have any other useful scripts that you'd like to make available I'd like to hear from you too!

• mailscanner.sh
  (FreeBSD) This is an init script designed to make starting, stopping and restarting MailScanner simple. It is also used by "spam_update.sh", so these two scripts work together. You can use any script really with "spam_update.sh" as long as it has a "restart" facility - it makes more sense if you read the scripts.

• spam_update.sh - updated 11-Jan-2007 (v1.9)
  (Linux, minor mods for FreeBSD) This is a nifty little hack I threw together to take the "custom_rules-yyymmdd.tgz" file and pump it into /etc/spamassassin. It is designed to work with the rule files I publish here. This means you can always roll back to a known (working) state if the new rules make your system puke :) It also checks the rules for errors before prompting whether you want to activate them. It also asks if you want to view the mail log after the update. On busy mail servers this can be useful to make sure mail is still flowing :P

• mailscanner-slow.sh
  (Linux) This script was originally the standard start/stop/restart script for MailScanner on Debian. My mail gateway was a painfully slow machine but it did the job. However, whenever I'd restart MailScanner the original script wouldn't wait for all child processes to finish before restarting again. This would result in MailScanner complaining that it was already running on PID xyz etc.
  My modified script has a additional logic and a customisable delay loop that waits for the children to exit before attempting to restart. The script is heavily commented where I've modified stuff so have a look at it first.

Licensing:

(What a pain) All the rules, files etc in the tar balls are licensed under the GPL. You are free to distribute, copy, modify etc, the rules and the associated files provided the license notice remains and a copy of the GPL is redistributed as well. (At least that's how I read the GPL)

Disclaimer:

The usual "no warranty given or implied" applies to all my rules. If they work for you, then that's just super :) If they jump up and eat your dog, cause your girlfriend to leave you, make you car explode or e-mail to disappear then don't blame me - it's up to you to test these rules for suitability to your own mail setup. Specifically my rules really punish anything that looks vaugely medical in content. Administrators working for medical institutions should audit these rules VERY carefully!

Site Stats:

Taken down due to referrer spam. Even though I'd put in place various filters to combat it, the spammers persisted, so I took it down. I just couldn't be bothered. Sorry.

Page Updated: 11-Jan-2007
All materials (unless otherwise stated) ©Copyright James Gray 2004-2007