Recently I converted my mail server to the Synology mailserver. I use a setup with IMAP accounts for storing all my emails.
Getting a running mail server converted to Synology went quite well and quickly. I must say I am impressed with the result.
What I do find scary is the backup facility. I really need to check if I can restore this backup easily. But how do I do this, I do not have a spare Synology to try this on. Maybe a project for a rainy day, a nice virtual image with the Synology software would be nice!
But now the subject at hand. After a few days I was again receiving spam messages, something I had overcome on the previous mailserver using assp. This should be a problem easily tackled on the Synology I thought.
Just go into the UI and check “Enable SpamAssassin filter engine” and boom, no spam.
The engine did not catch much… Okay maybe it needs further setup. Just go into Settings and enable auto learning?
Well as I have found before, Synology is a looker but often not a performer. I need to dig into the internals.
I was amazed to find on the web that spamassassin is bundled with some amazing tools. One that solves another of my long wished for features. How to you manage spam as a mail user without needing to access a mail server.
The solution is simple, each user on the mail server need to have a standardized Junk email folder in their IMAP store. On the mail server we regularly schedule to update a bayesian index on every users Junk folder. Now when new spam mail comes in and is not detected a user only needs to mark it as spam on his iphone, the mail is moved to Junk and the server indexes this every 2 hours or so to prevent this spam from coming in again.
Theory is great but now the setup!
The tool is called sa-learn and is called in the following way:
/var/packages/MailServer/target/bin/sa-learn --siteconfigpath /var/packages/MailServer/target/etc/spamassassin --dbpath /var/spool/MailScanner/spamassassin/ --spam /volume1/homes/*/.Maildir/.Junk/{new,cur}/
The last parameter is the magic trick to look at all the Junk mailboxes. Great, only it does not work on Synology….. 🙁
This is due to perl configuration. But fear not, others have found a solution, you need to call it as follows:
perl -T -Mlib=/var/packages/MailServer/target/lib/perl5/5.8.6 /var/packages/MailServer/target/bin/sa-learn --siteconfigpath /var/packages/MailServer/target/etc/spamassassin --dbpath /var/spool/MailScanner/spamassassin/ --spam /volume1/homes/*/.Maildir/.Junk/{new,cur}/
Problem is this will probably break on the next major DSM update but we will cross that bridge when we come to it.
The tool has some more tricks, so what I do is create the a script with name /opt/spamscan.sh with the following contents:
#!/bin/sh
date
echo "Scanning Spam Folders(s)"
perl -T -Mlib=/var/packages/MailServer/target/lib/perl5/5.8.6 /var/packages/MailServer/target/bin/sa-learn --siteconfigpath /var/packages/MailServer/target/etc/spamassassin --dbpath /var/spool/MailScanner/spamassassin/ --spam /volume1/homes/*/.Maildir/.Junk/{new,cur}/
echo "Updating SpamAssassin DB"
perl -T -Mlib=/var/packages/MailServer/target/lib/perl5/5.8.6 /var/packages/MailServer/target/bin/sa-learn --siteconfigpath /var/packages/MailServer/target/etc/spamassassin --dbpath /var/spool/MailScanner/spamassassin/ --sync
echo "Backing up SpamAssassin DB"
perl -T -Mlib=/var/packages/MailServer/target/lib/perl5/5.8.6 /var/packages/MailServer/target/bin/sa-learn --siteconfigpath /var/packages/MailServer/target/etc/spamassassin --dbpath /var/spool/MailScanner/spamassassin/ --backup > /opt/spamassassin_backup.bak
date
Use chmod on the script file to allow executing. chmod u+x /opt/spamscan.sh chmod g+x /opt/spamscan.sh chmod o+x /opt/spamscan.sh And I schedule this using /etc/crontab: 0 */2 * * * root /opt/spamscan.sh >> /var/log/spam_learn.log Wow, now all ready and done. You need to be patient. Having 20 Junk mail messages is not good enough for bayesian statistics. About a month later I had a few hundred but was not seeing all my spam being detected. Hmm BIG disappointment! Lets dig further. If you use your mail client to look at messages you can see there are added headers in the format of: X-Mailscanner. I found that some messages have a line X-Mailscanner-Spamcheck: not spam, SpamAssassin (not cached, score=3.6, required 5, BAYES_99 3.50, RDNS_NONE 0.10) but others do not. This is not working as I expected. I also found that the Mailscanner has 5 running instances on my Synology all taking about 50 Mb of memory, I have only limited mails coming in every day so I need to tone this down, the Synology only has 512 Mb… Okay lets dig into this and find the config files for SpamAssassin and Mailscanner. You can find these in /var/packages/MailServer/target/etc/MailScanner. But be careful changing this file, on next reboot it will be overwritten bij de config template. That is wat needs to be changed. So get your self a cup of coffee and use your favorite editor to update the file /var/packages/MailServer/target/etc/template/mailscanner.template, there are hundreds of options. Also nice to know, logging for the mail server is sent to /volume1/@maillog/ and not /var/log. The items I modified are:
%org-name% = <your name here>-
Max Children = 3
Always Include SpamAssassin Report = yes
Multiple Headers = add
Place New Headers At Top Of Message = yes
Log Spam = yes
Log Non Spam = yes
And now after running a while the results are much better. When a spam messages gets through, the headers will explain why, usually because spam score is not high enough. I add this email to Junk and the next identical spam message will always have a higher score until it is recognized correctly. I am a happy camper.
Thank you Synology for providing the platform and thank you internet for helping to configure the damn thing!