Knowledgebase

Change spam filtering and delivery settings for a virtual server#

This command can be used to change the location than email tagged as spam or virus-laden is delivered to for one or more virtual servers. The servers to act on can be either specified with the --domain parameter, or all domains with spam filtering enabled can be selected with --all-domains.

The following parameters control what happens to messages identified as spam:

--spam-delete - Delete all spam mail

--spam-deliver - Deliver to user’s mailbox normally

--spam-mailfile- Write to user’s ~/mail/spam file in mbox format

--spam-maildir - Write to user’s ~/Maildir/.spam file in Maildir format

--spam-file - Write to the file following this parameter, which must be relative to the user’s home directory

--spam-email - Forward to the email address following this parameter

--spam-dest - Write to the absolute file following the parameter

A similar set of options exist for virus filtering, but starting with --virus instead of --spam.

Virtualmin has the ability to delete spam from the spam folders of all users in a domain once it passes some threshold, such as age or size. You can enable this with the --spamclear-days parameter followed by the maximum age in days, or --spamclear-size followed by a size in bytes. Or to turn off spam deletion, use the --spamclear-none parameter.

Similarly you can enable automatic deletion from trash folders with the --trashclear-days parameter followed by the maximum age in days, or --trashclear-size followed by a size in bytes. Or to turn off trash deletion, use the --trashclear-none parameter.

SpamAssassin gives each message it scans a numeric score, and typically anything above 5 is considered spam and placed in a separate user folder. However, you can choose to simply delete all incoming spam with a score above some higher threshold (such as 10) using the --spam-delete-level parameter, which must be followed by a number. To turn this behavior off again, use the --spam-no-delete-level flag.

To enable the spam-trap and ham-trap aliases for the selected virtual servers, you can use the --spamtrap command-line flag. Similarly, to remove them use the --no-spamtrap flag. When enabled, users will be able to forward spam to [email protected] for adding to the domain’s blacklist.

Command line help#

virtualmin modify-spam --domain name | --all-domains
 [--spam-delete | --spam-deliver |
 --spam-mailfile [folder] |
 --spam-file file-under-home |
 --spam-email address | --spam-dest file |
 --spam-maildir [folder] ]
 [--spam-delete-level score | --spam-no-delete-level]
 [--virus-delete |
 --virus-mailfile [folder] |
 --virus-file file-under-home |
 --virus-email address | --virus-dest file
 --virus-maildir [folder] ]
 [--spam-whitelist | --no-spam-whitelist]
 [--use-spamassassin | --use-spamc]
 [--spamclear-none |
 --spamclear-days days
 --spamclear-size bytes]
 [--trashclear-none |
 --trashclear-days days
 --trashclear-size bytes]
 [--use-clamscan | --use-clamdscan |
 --use-clamd-stream-client | --use-clamdscan-remote]
 [--spamtrap | --no-spamtrap]

Modifying the SpamAssassin or virus scanning client for individual domains is deprecated.