# Will SpamAssassin work on email I'm just relaying?



## drhowarddrfine (Apr 5, 2014)

I'm using mail/sendmail to just transfer email sent to joe@mydomain.com to his personal account at joe@gmail.com. I'm using spamhaus for blacklisting but getting a couple of leaks and, more importantly, far too many bounce back spams which I believe are 'backscatter'. Since I'm only relaying that email, would mail/spamassassin still handle that or would mail/sendmail send it off before it gets to it?

If not, and I haven't started my reading yet, but I'm thinking that I'd like to create of authorized email addresses at 'domain1.com' and either dump everything into a file or /dev/null. Does anyone have any experience with that or better suggestions? I'm just doing baby steps right now and am not interested in other MTAs.


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## drhowarddrfine (Apr 5, 2014)

Examining these bounceback emails, I don't see how anything else can do anything about it. In the headers, it shows the "from:" is not me at all but the "From:" in the email address itself is like [email='djskld@mydomain.com]'djskld@mydomain.com[/email]' which is me. It's returned as "undeliverable" so what can be done?


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## kpa (Apr 5, 2014)

You can't do much about the bouncebacks because the messages are someone else posing as you and sending spam to random addresses. Some of the addresses will bounce because the accounts no longer exist or have some other problem, the end result is that the undeliverable status messages are sent back to the only possible address, your address.

As for filtering messages your mail server is relaying and not actually receiving, look at security/amavisd-new. It is used as a milter (short for mail filter) with Sendmail and run as part of the SMTP session before the mail is accepted into the mail queue so any messages flagged as spam are rejected before they are accepted for relaying or delivery.


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