Banks of the Boneyard

The Journal for the
Association for Computing Machinery
at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign

Volume 21, Issue 4
Thursday November 21st, 2002

     The following is meant to show you how to setup procmail and spamassassin on the student cluster. (If you are on express mail, this will not help you, sorry.)  Mis-use of these instructions has the potential to prevent you from receiving email. If you feel queasy about this, do not do it.

To setup Spamassassin on students:

  1. Log on to "staff.uiuc.edu" or "students.uiuc.edu" using SSH Shell.
  2. Goto a Unix prompt
  3. at the > prompt, type: pico .procmailrc This will create the hidden file ".procmailrc" in your home directory. This file is used by procmail to direct your email to be filtered by spamassassin. You can also use it to filter other things, but this isn't covered in this document.
  4. Once in pico, copy the following text (between dashes, not including them) and paste it into pico. These are the directives that spamassassin uses to operate. You may customize this, but I suggest that you only do so if you know exactly what you are doing. Mis-use of this can hurt your ability to receive email.
-------------------------------------
#Tell Spamassassin where your mail is
MAILDIR=$HOME/mail
#Use spamassassin to flag spam.
:
0fw
| /usr/local/bin/spamassassin
#Move flagged spam into the spam folder.
:
0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
spam
-------------------------------------

Spamassassin on Students
By Christopher Clausen

5) Save the file by pressing Ctrl-O and then Enter. Exit pico by pressing Ctrl-X. Procmail has now been configured to pass new email through spamassassin for filtering.
6) Now log-on to webmail http://webmail.uiuc.edu/ and create a new folder called "spam" to hold filtered email. (Note that "Spam" is not the same as "spam".) This folder is where email marked as spam by spamassassin will be placed.
7) Log-off webmail and refresh the mailbox list in either Eudora or Outlook and the "spam" folder should show up.  (If you can't get Eudora or Outlook to refresh your mailbox list, you can always just use webmail to check your spam folder.)

You should be all set!
Remember to check your spam folder periodically and delete unwanted messages. Messages in this folder will count toward your email quota. Also note that email that you may want could also end up here, so don't assume that everything in the spam folder is indeed spam.
Note: Spamassassin is not fully supported by CITES and may disappear at any time, without notice.

More information can be obtained from CITES at: http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/email/filtering.html
http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/email/spamassassin.html

Copyright © 2002 ACM@UIUC
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The Banks of the Boneyard is a student publication of the UIUC Chapter of ACM, and does not necessarily represent, in whole or in part, the views of the University of Illinois, the Department of Computer Science, or the International ACM.  Partially paid for by SORF and the Department of Computer Science.

Layout and Design:
Editor:
Banks Online:

Christopher Clausen
Christopher Clausen
http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/banks.shtml

For more information on ACM:
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<acm@uiuc.edu>

The Banks staff encourages readers to submit letters to the editor, articles or artwork for future issues.  If you would like to help in any way, please email boneyard@uiuc.edu

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