No Spam Today! for Servers Support

Welcome to the No Spam Today! for Servers Support. Here you will find the No Spam Today! FAQ lists, and links to some "How To..." guides.

Forum

The No Spam Today! support forum allows users to share tips and tricks on the topics of installation and custom rule design, and general discussion on the use of SpamAssassin™ on Windows™ platforms.

Other Resources

If you want to learn more about SpamAssassin's configuration options, see the SpamAssassin documentation files in the "sa\doc" subdirectory of your installation directory, or visit http://spamassassin.apache.org. Check out SpamAssassin's mailing lists, the archives are available here. There is also a powerful archive search engine available.

There are many SpamAssassin custom rulesets to be found in the SpamAssassin Wiki. For tips on custom rule writing, check out the SA Rules Emporium or look here.

No Spam Today! for Servers Howtos

No Spam Today! for Servers FAQs

Basics

What is Spam Assassin™?
Why do I seem to get email addressed to other people?

Trial Version, Registration Keys and Installation

Where can I download the free Trial Version?
When installing, I see the following error message: "bayes: bayes db version 2 is not able to be used, aborting! (...)
What are the limitations of the Trial Version?
What can I do when I lose my registration key?
What Version of No Spam Today! am I using?
How do I know there is an important update?
There is a newer version of No Spam Today! available. How do I update my installation?
Upon start No Spam Today! brings up the following message: "Your system clock appears to have been changed...

Licensing

I have 27 email boxes set up on my server but on my daily spam filtering report I have a used mail address count of 51. How can this happen?
I removed the user account from the mail server, but the address still shows up in my used address list. How do I reset the used address list?

No Spam Today! for Servers Configuration

My mail server is configured as SMTP relay server to all locally connected users (relay restrictions are configured based on IP addresses). Now - after installing No Spam Today! - I have an open relay!
Both No Spam Today! and the mail server run on the same machine. The IP address of that machine is not on the list of IP addresses where relaying is allowed. Why do I still have an open relay?
How can I make sure my mail server is not an open relay?
How can I change the incoming SMTP port of Microsoft Exchange 5.5?
I am trying to use NoSpamToday! with Exchange 2000 in a two IP address configuration. Why does the NoSpamToday! service fail to start?
I am trying to use NoSpamToday! with Exchange 2003 in a two IP address configuration. Why does the NoSpamToday! service fail to start?
How do I configure the No Spam Today! Service to automatically restart on failure?
The log file is cycled once it reaches a size of about 10MB. How can I increase the maximum log file size?
The log file contains many 'connection closed by client' messages. Is there a problem?
Does rejecting spam cause additional SMTP traffic?

SpamAssassin Configuration

Is it possible to have No Spam Today! add the spam indication via an X header rather than changing the subject line?
Some obvious spam messages aren't tagged as SPAM. What can I do?
How do I use SpamAssassin's automatic Bayesian Learning in No Spam Today! ?
How can I make SpamAssassin learn false positives and false negatives?
I use Microsoft [...] as mail client/mail server. How do I convert mail folders for use with sa-learn?
I just installed No Spam Today!, and only 77% of the spam messages I get are tagged as SPAM. What's wrong?
I enabled RBL checking, but it does not work. What did I do wrong?
Can I change SpamAssassin command line options?
Help! My new rule/configuration change does not work! How can I validate my changes?
How do I run SpamAssassin to produce diagnostic output?

AntiVirus Configuration

I'm receiving empty messages (no body and no subject). What is wrong?

You have a question unanswered here? Send an email to .

Basics

What is Spam Assassin™?
Award-winning SpamAssassin™ (http://spamassassin.apache.org) is considered the industry's leading spam filter, always finishing as one of the top contenders, or even best, in all spam filter tests. No Spam Today! always includes the latest stable version of SpamAssassin™. Future updates of SpamAssassin™ will be merged into the distribution, once they are proven and stable.

Note: We do not sell SpamAssassin™, it's Open Source and it's free!
SpamAssassin is a trademark of Deersoft, Inc.
The SpamAssassin open source project resides at http://spamassassin.apache.org.

Why do I seem to get email addressed to other people?
This can happen for two reasons:

You received a "blind carbon copy": the sender listed your address in the BCC address field.
The mail transfer protocol uses RCPT TO and MAIL FROM commands when transmitting a mail. The addresses used there need not have anything to do with the To and CC header fields in the message itself. But these header fields are displayed by your mail client. So it can appear the mail was not addressed to you at all.

Trial Version, Registration Keys and Installation

Where can I download the free Trial Version?
Please go to http://www.nospamtoday.com/download/server and download the setup program. If you are behind a firewall blocking the download of executable files, choose to download the .zip archive, and use any archive software to unpack the setup program. Start the setup program with a double click.

When installing, I see the following error message: "bayes: bayes db version 2 is not able to be used, aborting! (...)"
This message is misleading, the database update still proceeds as expected. The SpamAssassin Wiki says: "There is nothing to fear, it is just a warning."

What are the limitations of the Trial Version?
The Trial Version of No Spam Today! is fully functional for 30 days after installation. When you purchase the full version this limitation is removed.

What can I do when I lose my registration key?
Please go here and request the key. It will then be sent to your email address again.

What Version of No Spam Today! am I using?
There are four ways to find the version of No Spam Today!

check the log file noSPAMtoday.log in the installation directory, No Spam Today! logs its version when starting or when shutting down.
check the daily admin mail
find the version number on the license & registration page in the admin wizard
find the No Spam Today! executable file, right-click, select "Properties", and go to the "Version" tab.

How do I know there is an important update?
Enable the "Send Daily Admin Mail" feature in the admin wizard, and check "include update information". Also, make sure that your firewall allows NoSpamToday! to connect to our web server on port 80. This will notify you whenever important updates of No Spam Today! are available.

There is a newer version of No Spam Today! available. How do I update my installation?
Download the latest version and install it on top of your current installation. Installation will replace all the files of the SpamAssassin distribution, but the configuration files local.cf and noSPAMtoday.cf are preserved.

Upon start No Spam Today! brings up the following message: "Your system clock appears to have been changed..."
This is caused by the software protection mechanisms of No Spam Today! Please contact , to get a so called "clock fix key".

Licensing

I have 27 email boxes set up on my server but on my daily spam filtering report I have a used mail address count of 51. How can this happen?
No Spam Today! counts every recipient address accepted by your mail server that matches the list of address patterns you specified (if you did not specify this list, every address accepted is counted). Your mail server accepts an address for one of the following reasons:

You are relaying outgoing mail through No Spam Today!. If this mail is then spam-checked, the recipient address ends up on the list. Check the list of used addresses for evidence that this is happening. If so, let your users use the mail server directly for outbound mail, bypassing No Spam Today!. You should disable relaying any unauthenticated mail coming from No Spam Today! in your mail server's configuration.
Some mail servers accept all mail addresses in your domain on SMTP level, only to forward the mail silently to "postmaster" at a later stage during processing. In this case you need to explicitly define the recipient addresses with spam checking enabled.

I removed the user account from the mail server, but the address still shows up in my used address list. How do I reset the used address list?
Restart the No Spam Today! service, using either the Windows services manager, or the No Spam Today! admin wizard.

No Spam Today! for Servers Configuration

My mail server is configured as SMTP relay server to all locally connected users (relay restrictions are configured based on IP addresses). Now - after installing No Spam Today! - I have an open relay!
When No Spam Today! forwards mails your mail server "sees" only the IP address of the machine running No Spam Today!. You have to exclude the IP address of the No Spam Today! server from the list of hosts that you allow relaying for. Make sure the users you relay for connect to your mail server directly, not via No Spam Today! The No Spam Today! server is meant to filter incoming emails from the internet, and not the email of your trusted users.

Both No Spam Today! and the mail server run on the same machine. The IP address of that machine is not on the list of IP addresses where relaying is allowed. Why do I still have an open relay?
In No Spam Today!'s server settings, make sure you use the IP address as the outgoing server, and not localhost (127.0.0.1). If this isn't enough to fix the problem, assign two IP addresses to the machine, and use one for your mail server, and the other for No Spam Today!.

How can I make sure my mail server is not an open relay?
Open the No Spam Today! Admin Wizard and select "Perform Open Relay Test" from the "File" Menu to find out if your mail server accepts mails to external recipients.

How can I change the incoming SMTP port of Microsoft Exchange 5.5?
Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 doesn't directly support changing the incoming port for SMTP mail. In some circumstances (you have a firewall/router with network address translation) you may be able to direct incoming mail to the No Spam Today! proxy on another port, which can then pass it to the Exchange server on port 25. This may not be possible or desirable, e.g. when using applications that do not support configurable destination ports, or when there is no possibility for port translation, or when there are simply too many sources for messages that it would be inconvenient to reconfigure them all.
In these circumstances you can change the Exchange Server's incoming SMTP port by editing the 'services' file, found in \WINNT\system32\drivers\etc\ for example. Change the line:
smtp 25/tcp mail #Simple Mail Transfer Protocolto:
smtp 26/tcp mail #Simple Mail Transfer ProtocolRestart the machine after this change and Exchange will start listening on the new port. No Spam Today! can then listen on port 25 and forward mail to Exchange on port 26. Note that outgoing messages from the Exchange Server will continue to be sent to port 25.

I am trying to use NoSpamToday! with Exchange 2000 in a two IP address configuration. Why does the NoSpamToday! service fail to start?
Exchange sometimes grabs the SMTP port on all interfaces, even when it has been configured not to. Click here for a Microsoft knowledge base article that tells you what to do.

I am trying to use NoSpamToday! with Exchange 2003 in a two IP address configuration. Why does the NoSpamToday! service fail to start?
To solve this issue you have to disable socket pooling for the protocols that you want to filter with NoSpamToday!. For SMTP and POP3 you can apply the following procedure:

1. Open a command prompt

2. Change the directory to Inetpub\scripts (or Inetpub\adminscripts)

3. Enter the following depending on the service that you want to disable socket pooling for, e.g. for SMTP:

   net stop smtpsvc
   cscript adsutil.vbs set smtpsvc/disablesocketpooling true
   net start smtpsvc

How do I configure the No Spam Today! Service to automatically restart on failure?
Launch the Services Manager, select the “No Spam Today! Service” entry and open its property page by double-clicking, switch to the “Recovery” tab page and select “Restart Service” for failure from the dropdown list.

The log file is cycled once it reaches a size of about 1MB. How can I increase the maximum log file size?
To increase the size for example to 10.000.000 byte, add this line to the noSPAMtoday.cf file in your installation directory, using a text editor: MaxLogFileSize=10000000

The log file contains many 'connection closed by client' messages. Is there a problem?
The most likely cause for this message is that some bulk mail software used by a spammer did not wait for the confirmation that the mail server has accepted the message. No Spam Today! writes the above message to the log and immediately releases all resources held by this SMTP session.

Does rejecting spam cause additional SMTP traffic?
It does, but not directly for you. The only difference between accepting and rejecting a mail is your side's reply to the DATA command: In the accept case it is "250 message queued for delivery" (or something similar), in the reject case it is "550 [your rejection message]". The mail delivery failure notice is not created by your mail server, but by the sending mail server. The mail delivery failure notice typically does not reach spammers at all, as a spammer won't give his real address, but it can be useful to inform legitimate users that their message was tagged as spam and might not be read.

SpamAssassin Configuration

Is it possible to have No Spam Today! add the spam indication via an X header rather than changing the subject line?
By default the mail headers already contain "X-Spam-Status" and "X-Spam-Level" headers you can use as spam indicators. If you want to disable subject rewriting, just clear the "subject tag" edit field in the No Spam Today! admin wizard. This will disable the appropriate "rewrite_header" configuration option of SpamAssassin.

Some obvious spam messages aren't tagged as SPAM. What can I do?
SpamAssassin is not human, spam which is obvious to you may not be obvious to SpamAssassin. You have several possible options:

There are dozens of custom rulesets available to augment the distribution SpamAssassin rulesets. The best place to find them is the SpamAssassin Wiki. To use a ruleset, download it and copy the .cf file to the sa\ruleset subdirectory of your No Spam Today! installation. Watch out for updates of these rulesets, and install them regularly.
Note that using additional rulesets may slow down mail checking, each additional ruleset increases memory and CPU usage of SpamAssassin.
Add your own rules that increase the spam score if a message satisfies certain conditions. This is not easy to do, read here and here to learn how this is done. Custom rules should be added to the local.cf file in the sa\ruleset subdirectory of your No Spam Today! installation.
There is an increasing amount of spam optimized to get low SpamAssassin scores. If this is the case, typical spam words are deliberately mis-spelled: ssuper ssales, v.i.a.g.r.a and the like. It can help to train the Bayesian filter of SpamAssassin to capture these mails. However, there is a minimum number of messages that has to be learned before the results of the Bayes tests are used by SpamAssassin. Find out more here.
If you find that many of these mails contain a virus, install and integrate a virus filter to get rid of those messages at SMTP level.

How do I use SpamAssassin's automatic Bayesian Learning in No Spam Today! ?
If you use the default SpamAssassin configuration provided, Bayesian Learning will be enabled. The Bayesian database is then built incrementally by learning from incoming mails which hit the spam or nonspam thresholds. For details and further information see the SpamAssassin documentation, and the sa-learn documentation. If you are using Microsoft™ products, read the "How to..." guides supplied here and here.

How can I make SpamAssassin learn false positives and false negatives?
Collect false positives and negatives in separate mail folders. Enable the bayes database (set "use_bayes" to "1"). Use the sa-learn program in the sa subdirectory of your installation to feed the mails into SpamAssassin's database. For details and further information see the SpamAssassin documentation, and the sa-learn documentation. If you are using Microsoft™ products, read the "How to..." guides supplied here and here.

I use Microsoft [...] as mail client/mail server. How do I convert mail folders for use with sa-learn?
Microsoft mail software uses proprietary formats for its mail databases. Read the "How to..." guides supplied here and here to learn what you can do.

I just installed No Spam Today!, and only 77% of the spam messages I get are tagged as SPAM. What's wrong?
The Bayes tests do not work immediately. At least a minimum number of 200 messages has to be learned before the results of the Bayes tests are used by SpamAssassin. If you do not use sa-learn to explicitly add more spam mails to your Bayesian database, this database may grow only slowly.

I enabled RBL checking, but it does not work. What did I do wrong?
Make sure the DNS server setting is correct. To check if your DNS server works, test if a DNS lookup is successful. Typing something like this in a command line window should return our web server's IP address:

nslookup www.no-spam-today.com <your DNS server>

Can I change SpamAssassin command line options?
You can change the default command line used to start SpamAssassin by editing the SpamAssassin filter settings. Be sure to check "advanced options" before proceeding from the first page of the wizard. The default setting is as follows:

sa\spamassassin.exe -x --siteconfigpath="sa/ruleset" -e 255.

Help! My new rule/configuration change does not work! How can I validate my changes?
Open a command line window, change to the NST installation directory and test all your .cf files with SpamAssassin's lint option:

sa\spamassassin.exe -x --siteconfigpath="sa/ruleset" --lint

If you want to check whether SpamAssassin is using a certain configuration file, just put in a syntax error in this file (e.g. write a line with the word "foo" in it). If the file is used by SpamAssassin, an error should be reported.

How do I run SpamAssassin to produce diagnostic output ?
Open a command line window, change to the NST installation directory and run:

cd [NoSpamToday! InstallationDirectory]

sa\spamassassin.exe -x --siteconfigpath="sa/ruleset" -D < <mail message file> >out 2>err

<mail message file> is a file containing a test message to be scanned. The diagnostics are written to the err file.

Anti Virus Filter Configuration

I'm receiving empty messages (no body and no subject). What is wrong?
Make sure the "use console output (stdout)" checkbox is not checked. Most virus filters only are analyze only, and have no output.