Category: exim

Exim selective copying/bcc’ing of mail based on sender and recipient

If you’re unfortunate enough to be using Exim, and you need to configure the server to selectively bcc some emails (e.g. emails going to a specific recipient need bcc’ing to another address for archiving/compliance purposes) then the following may be useful :

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exim + spamassassin subject rewriting on symbiosis

One customer of mine has an Bytemark Symbiosis based exim mailserver which uses SpamAssassin. It works pretty well – however the :

rewrite_header Subject *****SPAM*****

directive in spamassassin (/etc/spamassassin/local.cf) seemed to be being ignored – and the only effect of the mail being classified as spam is/was a couple of additional headers added (X-Spam-Status: spam). For the customer in question this wasn’t of much use – as they’re reasonably non-technical and probably couldn’t create a client side mail filter. And they also thought the spamfiltering wasn’t working.

I found adding the following to /etc/exim4/system_filter results in the subject being appropriately modified :

if $h_X-Spam-Status: contains "spam"
then
    headers add "Old-Subject: $h_subject"
    headers remove "Subject"
    headers add "Subject: *** SPAM *** $h_old-subject"
    headers remove "Old-Subject"
endif

And if you want to tag virus-ey emails … add this in as well : 

# X-Anti-Virus: infected
if $h_X-Anti-Virus: contains "infected"
then
    headers add "Old-Subject: $h_subject"
    headers remove "Subject"
    headers add "Subject: *** VIRUS *** $h_old-subject"
    headers remove "Old-Subject"
endif

Seeing as how that took about 2 hours to figure out – hopefully this will be of use to others.

I started looking at SpamAssassin and wondering why IT wasn’t doing it… I still don’t know why – but assume it’s an Exim ‘feature’.