Welcome to the CleanMail FAQ. Here you will find the CleanMail Frequently Asked Questions, and links to some "How To..." guides.
To learn more about SpamAssassin's
configuration options,
see the SpamAssassin documentation files in the "sa\doc"
subdirectory of your installation directory, or visit
https://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.
IMPORTANT: Since Mar 1, 2021, ClamWin does no longer receive virus signature updates! We recommend to replace ClamWin with ClamAV, see below for details.
To use ClamAV with CleanMail on Windows, please follow these instructions:
Please visit ClamAV on Windows FAQ for more information.
What is Spam Assassin™?
Award-winning SpamAssassin™ (https://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. CleanMail 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™, as it is free open source software! SpamAssassin is a trademark of Deersoft, Inc. The SpamAssassin open source project resides at https://spamassassin.apache.org.
What is ClamAV?
Clam AntiVirus (ClamAV) is a free software, cross-platform and open-source antivirus software
toolkit
able to detect many types of malicious software, including viruses. One of its main uses is on mail
servers as a server-side email virus scanner.
Why do I seem to get email addressed to other people?
This can happen for two reasons:
BCC address field, and thus omitted from the message.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 as if the mail was not addressed to
you at all.Where can I download the free trial version?
Please go to https://www.byteplant.com/cleanmail/
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.
What are the limitations of the trial version?
The Trial Version of CleanMail is fully functional for 30 days after installation. When you purchase
the
full version this limitation is removed.
Where can I enter the registration key?
To enter the registration key, bring up CleanMail's admin application (if you don't know how to do
this,
see below). Choose Help -> Register from the menu. After pressing "Register", the display should
change
to show information about your key and your support plan.
What can I do when I lose my registration key?
Please contact the Customer Support team and request the key.
It will then be sent to your email address again.
What version am I using?
There are three ways to find out which version you are using
How do I know there is an important update?
You are notified about important updates
automatically. If not, make sure that your firewall allows CleanMail to connect to our web server
(www.byteplant.com:80).
There is a newer version of CleanMail 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 CleanMail.cf are preserved.
I installed CleanMail, but I still receive spam mails. What am I doing wrong?
After installing and configuring CleanMail, you also need to change your mail account settings. Also,
CleanMail
will only tag spam mails, and not delete them. To get rid of spam mails, you have to set up a
filtering
rule in your mail client to remove all mails tagged "SPAM" from your incoming folder.
Since using CleanMail I am getting lots of duplicated email messages. What's wrong?
If you enabled "Leave Messages On Server" (or something similar),
some mail clients retrieve all your mail again whenever you change some detail of
your mail account settings (such as enabling/disabling CleanMail).
I am using [...] as mail client. Is this mail client supported?
For CleanMail to work, the POP3 settings of your mail accounts have to be changed, so that mail is
fetched via CleanMail, and not from your ISP's POP3 server directly. CleanMail will work with every
mail
client.
I am testing CleanMail with the [...] mail client and have [...] antivirus software installed.
This
software is already using port 110. What can I do?
Set the POP3 port your mail client uses to 111, and set the POP3 port number of CleanMail to 111,
too
(the setting can be found on the last page of the configuration wizard). This way you will
get
a checking pipeline like this:
mail client - (port 111) - CleanMail - (port 110) - antivirus - (port 110) - ISP POP3 server
If you want to uninstall CleanMail later, remember that CleanMail's uninstall program will not reset the POP3 port of your mail client back to 110, you have to do this by hand.
I am using some version of an MS Outlook™ mail client. How can I set up a filtering rule to
remove spam messages?
Find a menu item like "Tools/Message Rules/E-Mail" (the location depends on the version of
Outlook
you are using). In this dialog you can set up a rule that moves all mails with a certain text
in
the subject, e.g. "* SPAM *", to some other folder.
The attachment/antivirus filter seem to ignore the whitelist. What is going wrong?
For security reasons, the attachment filter and the anti virus filter ignore whitelisting.
You can change this behaviour by setting IgnoreWhitelist="false" for these
filters by modifying the corresponding sections in the config file with a text editor.
Please see the reference chapter of the user manual for details.
I want to write my own custom filter. What do I have to keep in mind?
Any custom (external) filter has to be a separate executable, reading the mail
input from stdin and writing the (modified) mail output to stdout.
Filter results can be indicated by setting different exit codes, which can then
be used to control the actions to be taken by assigning an appropriate mail policy.
A legitimate message is rejected because of a MIME violation. What gives?
MIME errors may be used to slip malware past our filters, so we recommend rejecting malformed
messages
outright. The MIME checks are done by the attachment filter, and the reason is logged in CleanMail's
log
file, if you enabled the "log filter errors" option. If you have captured the offending message with
a
mail storage, you can also validate the message after the fact, by using our free online email
validator.
How do I add custom spam phrase rules?
Adding custom rules is very easy. All you have to do is to open the
sa/ruleset/local.cf file with a text editor of your choice and use
one of these templates:
body MYRULE_1 /<spam phrase>/i
describe MYRULE_1 body contains <spam phrase>
score MYRULE_1 5.0
header MYRULE_2 Subject =~ /<spam phrase>/i
describe MYRULE_2 subject contains <spam phrase>
score MYRULE_2 5.0
full MYRULE_3 /<spam phrase>/i
describe MYRULE_3 mail contains <spam phrase>
score MYRULE_3 5.0
Please note that rule names (like MY_RULE_x in the above examples) must be unique. For further information on how to write your own rules, please see the Custom Rules Tutorial.
Is it possible to have CleanMail 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 CleanMail 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:
sa\ruleset subdirectory of
your
CleanMail installation. Watch out for updates of these rulesets, and install them
regularly.local.cf file in the
sa\ruleset subdirectory of your CleanMail installation.
How do I use SpamAssassin's automatic Bayesian Learning in CleanMail?
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. You can also learn messages manually (choose messages to learn on the report
tab
of the CleanMail application). For details about learning multiple messages or entire message
folders see the SpamAssassin
documentation, and the sa-learn
documentation.
I just installed CleanMail, 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.
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 CleanMail configuration 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 CleanMail configuration directory and run:
cd [CleanMail configuration directory]
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.
How do I block mails in foreign languages?
Add a line like this one in your
sa\ruleset\local.cf file:
ok_locales xx [ yy zz ... ] (default: all)
loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::TextCat
This option is used to specify which locales are considered OK for incoming mail. Mail using the character sets that are allowed by this option will not be marked as possibly being spam in a foreign language.
If you receive lots of spam in foreign languages, and never get any non-spam in these languages, this may help. Note that all ISO-8859-* character sets, and Windows code page character sets, are always permitted by default.
The rules CHARSET_FARAWAY, CHARSET_FARAWAY_BODY, and CHARSET_FARAWAY_HEADERS are triggered based on how this is set.
Examples:
Note: if there are multiple ok_locales lines, only the last one is used.
Select the locales to allow from the list below:
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.