A note about Panix's old "shared filters"
Years ago, when spam first started to become a problem, Panix set up filters that users could invoke via procmail. There were several sets of these, and they still exist on the system, but they have become ineffective and, if you're using them, we recommend that you discontinue their use in favor of SpamAssassin.
SpamAssassin is third-party software that examines each message to see whether it matches a list of characteristics. Each characteristic carries a point value, and the message gets a score that is the sum of the points of its characteristics. If the score is above a preset threshold, the message is considered spam. You can control the threshold, the point value for any of the characteristics, and what happens to messages with scores above the threshold. It also permits whitelisting and blacklisting specific addresses or domains, and filtering messages with foreign character sets.
More detailed information is available on our help pages for using Spamassassin in webmail and procmail
.It is a bad idea to invoke Spamassassin both from webmail and from procmail, but you can run procmail for other purposes and use webmail's SpamAssassin without any problem.
In addition to SpamAssassin, Unix-savvy users have other anti-spam options that they can run from procmail. (Note that anything run from procmail will be run after SpamAssassin runs from webmail.) Detailed instructions for these are beyond the scope of the help desk, but information on bogofilter and spambayes are available from SourceForge.
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