SSH, Procmail, Spam sorting

[MrGibbage]

Happy Easter, Everyone. I am new to BH, and so far I am quite happy. I do have a few questions:
1. I registered for SSH access, and received an email back saying it had been actived. I tried using the javascript web access at the CP, but it wasn't working for me. I have also tried putty and SSH straight from my linux box, and none of them worked either. What's the trick? What URL should I got to? What username and password do I use?
2. Does BH use procmail? What do they use for email? Sendmail or Qmail?
3. I turned on the spamassassin, and it is modifying my subject lines. I'd like to have it sorted/deleted on the server side, if possible. Also, how do I tune SA? How do I tell it if it misfires on a real spam, or incorrectly calls a real email "SPAM"?

[MrGibbage]

I take it from the lack of responses that the answers are "No" to #2 & #3. What about #1? Anyone using SSH here?

[areidmtm]

I use SSH with putty. The Host Name is your domain name and the username and password are the same as you use to get into cPanel. When you first login, it will say something about the security key. Just say 'yes'/'accept'.

As for spamassassin, I use it to add the word "SPAM...." to the subject lines. Then I use the email filter to delete any mail with that same word in the subject. You could also set it up to forward it to another account to store it. I haven’t had any major problems with that method. Every once in a while one email will get through, but that rarely. It's far easier to delete one spam email then 40 or 50.

Also to help cut down on span, I turned off the "catch-all" option.

I hope that helps and welcome to bluehost.

[kusi]

.procmailrc is ignored. Before I joined BH, they assured me to have procmail, but no success for me so far. I opened a ticket 2 weeks ago to enable .procmail. They told procmail is only possible for your main emailaccount and they have to activate it. But after 10 emails I got tired and wrote my own perl script to proccess my emails.

In this regards, BH's dissappointing

[rando]

2. Does BH use procmail? What do they use for email? Sendmail or Qmail?
3. I turned on the spamassassin, and it is modifying my subject lines. I'd like to have it sorted/deleted on the server side, if possible. Also, how do I tune SA? How do I tell it if it misfires on a real spam, or incorrectly calls a real email "SPAM"?

To answer question 2, procmail is installed on all of the machines, so a user who knows what he is doing can easily use it to filter messages to his heart's desire. We do not provide any support for procmail, though.

Cpanel only works with exim, so that is the MTA we are forced to use.

[kusi]

To answer question 2, procmail is installed on all of the machines, so a user who knows what he is doing can easily use it to filter messages to his heart's desire. We do not provide any support for procmail, though.

Cpanel only works with exim, so that is the MTA we are forced to use.

This is not exactly true. Procmail is indeed installed but not functional. As I told, .procmailrc is ignored (and I know what I am doing in .procmailrc). And as Felippe Burk (from BH) answered to me, it would only work for the main user and not for additional emailaddresses. Is that correct, Rando? This restriction basically makes your procmail installation useless

Kusi

[rando]

Is that correct, Rando?

When you put it that way, it's true. You can't just drop a .procmailrc file in and have it work. However, that wasn't what I was talking about.

While you can't do exactly what you said, you should be able to set up a filter which calls the procmail binary directly and points it at the procmail rc file you want to use, which then does its filtering and then delivers to the proper mailbox.

As I said, you have to know what you're doing, but it is quite possible. You mentioned that you have a perl script filtering your mail right now; all you'd have to do is call procmail with the proper options in a similar way to how you're calling your perl script.

[MrGibbage]

Rando, that is very interesting. I certainly know my way around procmail and .procmailrc and can understand BH's hesitation to offer support for it, but couldn't you just give us a little hint of how to implement it on BH. Heck, if someone just posted a working copy of a .procmailrc (or perl script) that just filters email into different imap folders, I think it would help the entire community here.

Btw, I figured out what was wrong with my SSH access, stupid iptables on my firewall.

[MrGibbage]

Oh, I forgot to ask. Is spamassassin compiled with the Bayes learner? How can I train my spamassassin on missed spam messages? Could I set up a myname-spam account which pipes email through sa-learn, and then just forward any missed spam messages to that account? Again, I think I am looking at a procmail solution. Are any of you updating/"personalizing" your spamassassin installation?

[kusi]

When you put it that way, it's true. You can't just drop a .procmailrc file in and have it work. However, that wasn't what I was talking about.

While you can't do exactly what you said, you should be able to set up a filter which calls the procmail binary directly and points it at the procmail rc file you want to use, which then does its filtering and then delivers to the proper mailbox.

As I said, you have to know what you're doing, but it is quite possible. You mentioned that you have a perl script filtering your mail right now; all you'd have to do is call procmail with the proper options in a similar way to how you're calling your perl script.

thanks for your answer Rando. I didn't think about calling procmail myself via filter. Good idea! Since I already have a satisfying solution for me, I keep off procmal for now, but Randos idea's probably the way to go.

If somebody's interested in my solution in perl:
1) in cPanel, add a filter with destination "|/home/user/email.pl"

2) create /home/user/email.pl which looks like

#!/usr/bin/perl

@lines = <>;
$mail = join( "",@lines);
$mailbox = "/home/user/mail/mydomain/myemail/my-imap-folder";
open OUT, ">>$mailbox";

# im my case I want to rewrite the header of a forwarded Outlook email such
# that the correct name of the sender (and not my name) appears after
# "From:"
# insert your own modification/actions here
$mail =~ s/From: "L.*?(\n.*?From: )(.*?)\n/From: $2$1$2\n/s;
$mail =~ s/Subject: FW:/Subject: /;


print OUT $mail;
close OUT;



MrGibbage, if you only want to put an email into a folder without any processing, just use cPanels "Add Filter" and destination "/home/user/mail/mydomain/myemail/my-imap-folder". Works great!

Kusi