Chip wrote:
So I'm trying to ascertain the real value of jumping ship from the filtering capabilities of SpamAssassin (which can use regex expressions) to a .procmail/perl module hybrid.
They're tools for different types of mail filtering. You can't really replace one with the other.
SpamAssassin is intended to flag mail as spam or not spam, based on the aggregated results of hundreds of different tests, but it doesn't otherwise change anything about how the message is handled. (If your GUI control panel claims that it does, it's glossing over the extra configuration it does to handle different SA results in different ways.) Among other things, SpamAssassin itself has NO support for doing the actual message delivery to a mail folder; it relies on procmail and friends for that.
procmail and similar tools are used to take different actions depending on the results of single individual tests. "Individual tests" can mean calls to programs like SpamAssassin, or much simpler checks on the contents of headers or body. procmail certainly supports regular expressions, just not (IIRC) Perl-compatible regular expressions.
Whereas SpamAssassin is already built into Cpanel/WHM and is opeartional and I have minimally tested it to approval, the hybrid model looks attractive.
cPanel either already uses procmail or some similar external program, or uses some component of Exim to do basic message sorting and actually deliver messages to a mail folder.
Looking at a cPanel instance controlling something of an experimental personal domain, it looks like the filtering supports most of the common message-data matches by way of Exim's internal features.
You should probably check on a cPanel forum or contact your hosting provider for further help, but it looks to me like the built-in email filtering and sorting solution should be able to do what you need. As far as I could see, you've got a fair bit of flexibility there already to file messages in different folders based on contents of various headers.
Trying to wedge SpamAssassin in to check on other headers, and then trying to configure whatever handles the SA results to do what you want, is going to be working against the tools. For the sake of curiosity, what were you trying to achieve that you couldn't do in cPanel as-is?
I'm just wondering about the wiring of this into cpanel/WHM and any conflicts it could create: such as what happens when both SpamAssassin and perl module hybrid compete for filtering? Things like that. The downside of SpamAssassin is it doens't move to folders just changes the subject line, which I then query in the Cpanel built-in exim filters to move.
SpamAssassin's flagging method can be changed in quite a few different ways; see the documentation at http://spamassassin.apache.org/full/3.4.x/doc/Mail_SpamAssassin_Conf.html. I'm not sure how much of this is exposed in cPanel though (looks like "next to nothing"); you may have to see if there's an "edit configuration file by hand" widget to get at many of these options.
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