Mailman and Spamassassin

Question

Greetings again,
My mail configuration is humming along nicely, but there is a small matter which irks me somewhat. We run a mailing list for our company so that any mail our customers send to our main e-mail address gets bounced to all our personal accounts.
Since out e-mail address is advertised on our website, spam-blocking is a big consideration, so we've set up set of Spamassassin/Bayes rules which greatly cut down on Spam. Naturally, we've also assembled a comprehensive "whitelist_sender" hash file to make sure nothing from our clients ever gets blocked.
When spam does get through, it gets marked in the subject "<Junk> <Junk>". This dual-marking puzzled me at first, but I realized that mail gets scanned once it arrives on our server and then again as the server delivers it to each e-mail on the mailman list. The problem is, I've occasionally seen list e-mails with the spam marking "<junk>" only appear one in the subject line. To further confuse matters, I've seen them appear on e-mails from people who are whitelisted. Why would a different set of rules apply for the mailing list delivery?
A mailing list mails are from "[email protected]". Does Amavis scan the the "From:" field of the e-mail or the "FROM" envelope header? I've considered adding "localhost" to the whitelist_sender file, but I fear that all e-mails would then go unscanned.
Have other people encountered this situation? Any simple solutions?

Answer 1

Depending on the usage of your server....
You could have amavis discard or bounce the messages before they hit Mailman (if you don't mind the same for your non-mailman mail).
If you look in /etc/amavisd.conf, you'll find a kill_level (default of 22), you can set this to a lower number. Some sites, which prefer aggressive anti-spam protection, will set this to the same level as tag2 (also in the config file).
In this way, no spam which hits the threshold is delivered.
Make sure to configure finalspamdestiny to your preference.
Again, this would effect your non-mailman users- so whether this is viable for you- I don't know.
Jeff