Mail::SpamAssassin - Spam detector and markup engine
my $spamtest = Mail::SpamAssassin->new();
my $mail = $spamtest->parse($message);
my $status = $spamtest->check($mail);
if ($status->is_spam()) {
$message = $status->rewrite_mail();
}
else {
...
}
...
$status->finish();
$mail->finish();
Mail::SpamAssassin is a module to identify spam using several methods including text analysis, internet-based realtime blacklists, statistical analysis, and internet-based hashing algorithms.
Using its rule base, it uses a wide range of heuristic tests on mail headers and body text to identify "spam", also known as unsolicited bulk email. Once identified as spam, the mail can then be tagged as spam for later filtering using the user's own mail user agent application or at the mail transfer agent.
If you wish to use a command-line filter tool, try the spamassassin
or the spamd/spamc tools provided.
Constructs a new Mail::SpamAssassin object. You may pass a hash
reference to the constructor which may contain the following attribute-
value pairs.
This is the debug options used to determine logging level. It exists to allow sections of debug messages (called "facilities") to be enabled or disabled. If this is a string, it is treated as a comma-delimited list of the debug facilities. If it's a hash reference, then the keys are treated as the list of debug facilities and if it's a array reference, then the elements are treated as the list of debug facilities.
There are also two special cases: (1) if the special case of "info" is passed as a debug facility, then all informational messages are enabled; (2) if the special case of "all" is passed as a debug facility, then all debugging facilities are enabled.
1 to recurse through directories when reading configuration
files, instead of just reading a single level. (optional, default 0)
rules_filename, site_rules_filename,
and userprefs_filename.
config_text, this text is placed after config_text to allow an
override of config files.
UNWANTED_LANGUAGE_BODY, and are using config_text instead of
rules_filename, site_rules_filename, and userprefs_filename, you will
need to set this. It should be the path to the languages file normally
found in the SpamAssassin rules directory.
site_rules_filename directory will
be ignored. *.pre files (used for loading plugins) found in the
site_rules_filename directory will still be used. (default: 0)
Mail::SpamAssassin::PerMsgStatus object. Used for debugging.
username attribute will use this as the current user's name.
Otherwise, the default is taken from the runtime environment (ie. this process'
effective UID under UNIX).
If none of rules_filename, site_rules_filename, userprefs_filename, or
config_text is set, the Mail::SpamAssassin module will search for the
configuration files in the usual installed locations using the below variable
definitions which can be passed in.
Used as the root for certain directory paths such as:
'__prefix__/etc/mail/spamassassin' '__prefix__/etc/spamassassin'
Defaults to "/usr".
sa-update and compiling rulesets to native code. Defaults to
"/var/lib/spamassassin".
Parse will return a Mail::SpamAssassin::Message object with just the headers parsed. When calling this function, there are two optional parameters that can be passed in: $message is either undef (which will use STDIN), a scalar of the entire message, an array reference of the message with 1 line per array element, or a file glob which holds the entire contents of the message; and $parse_now, which specifies whether or not to create the MIME tree at parse time or later as necessary.
The $parse_now option, by default, is set to false (0). This
allows SpamAssassin to not have to generate the tree of internal
data nodes if the information is not going to be used. This is
handy, for instance, when running spamassassin -d, which only
needs the pristine header and body which is always parsed and stored
by this function.
For more information, please see the Mail::SpamAssassin::Message
and Mail::SpamAssassin::Message::Node POD.
Check a mail, encapsulated in a Mail::SpamAssassin::Message object,
to determine if it is spam or not.
Returns a Mail::SpamAssassin::PerMsgStatus object which can be
used to test or manipulate the mail message.
Note that the Mail::SpamAssassin object can be re-used for further messages
without affecting this check; in OO terminology, the Mail::SpamAssassin
object is a "factory". However, if you do this, be sure to call the
finish() method on the status objects when you're done with them.
Check a mail, encapsulated in a plain string $mailtext, to determine if it
is spam or not.
Otherwise identical to check() above.
Learn from a mail, encapsulated in a Mail::SpamAssassin::Message object.
If $isspam is set, the mail is assumed to be spam, otherwise it will
be learnt as non-spam.
If $forget is set, the attributes of the mail will be removed from
both the non-spam and spam learning databases.
$id is an optional message-identification string, used internally
to tag the message. If it is undef, the Message-Id of the message
will be used. It should be unique to that message.
Returns a Mail::SpamAssassin::PerMsgLearner object which can be used to
manipulate the learning process for each mail.
Note that the Mail::SpamAssassin object can be re-used for further messages
without affecting this check; in OO terminology, the Mail::SpamAssassin
object is a "factory". However, if you do this, be sure to call the
finish() method on the learner objects when you're done with them.
learn() and check() can be run using the same factory. init_learner()
must be called before using this method.
Initialise learning. You may pass the following attribute-value pairs to this method.
finish_learner()) (optional, default 0).
Rebuild any cache databases; should be called after the learning process.
Options include: verbose, which will output diagnostics to stdout
if set to 1.
Finish learning.
Dump the contents of the Bayes DB
Signals that the current user has changed (possibly using setuid), meaning
that SpamAssassin should close any per-user databases it has open, and re-open
using ones appropriate for the new user.
Note that this should be called after reading any per-user configuration, as that data may override some paths opened in this method. You may pass the following attribute-value pairs:
username attribute.
userstate_dir will be the
.spamassassin subdirectory of this dir.
user_dir/.spamassassin.
Report a mail, encapsulated in a Mail::SpamAssassin::Message object, as
human-verified spam. This will submit the mail message to live,
collaborative, spam-blocker databases, allowing other users to block this
message.
It will also submit the mail to SpamAssassin's Bayesian learner.
Options is an optional reference to a hash of options. Currently these can be:
Revoke a mail, encapsulated in a Mail::SpamAssassin::Message object, as
human-verified ham (non-spam). This will revoke the mail message from live,
collaborative, spam-blocker databases, allowing other users to block this
message.
It will also submit the mail to SpamAssassin's Bayesian learner as nonspam.
Options is an optional reference to a hash of options. Currently these can be:
Given a string containing an email address, add it to the automatic whitelist database.
Given a mail message, find as many addresses in the usual headers (To, Cc, From etc.), and the message body, and add them to the automatic whitelist database.
Given a string containing an email address, remove it from the automatic whitelist database.
Given a mail message, find as many addresses in the usual headers (To, Cc, From etc.), and the message body, and remove them from the automatic whitelist database.
Given a string containing an email address, add it to the automatic whitelist database with a high score, effectively blacklisting them.
Given a mail message, find addresses in the From headers and add them to the automatic whitelist database with a high score, effectively blacklisting them.
Note that To and Cc addresses are not used.
Returns the text of the message, with any SpamAssassin-added text (such as the report, or X-Spam-Status headers) stripped.
Note that the $mail object is not modified.
Warning: if the input message in $mail contains a mixture of CR-LF (Windows-style) and LF (UNIX-style) line endings, it will be "canonicalized" to use one or the other consistently throughout.
Read a configuration file and parse user preferences from it.
User preferences are as defined in the Mail::SpamAssassin::Conf manual page.
In other words, they include scoring options, scores, whitelists and
blacklists, and so on, but do not include rule definitions, privileged
settings, etc. unless allow_user_rules is enabled; and they never include
the administrator settings.
Read configuration paramaters from SQL database and parse scores from it. This
will only take effect if the perl DBI module is installed, and the
configuration parameters user_scores_dsn, user_scores_sql_username, and
user_scores_sql_password are set correctly.
The username in $username will also be used for the username attribute of
the Mail::SpamAssassin object.
Read configuration paramaters from an LDAP server and parse scores from it.
This will only take effect if the perl Net::LDAP and URI modules are
installed, and the configuration parameters user_scores_dsn,
user_scores_ldap_username, and user_scores_ldap_password are set
correctly.
The username in $username will also be used for the username attribute of
the Mail::SpamAssassin object.
Set the persistent address list factory, used to create objects for the
automatic whitelist algorithm's persistent-storage back-end. See
Mail::SpamAssassin::PersistentAddrList for the API these factory objects
must implement, and the API the objects they produce must implement.
Compile all patterns, load all configuration files, and load all possibly-required Perl modules.
Normally, Mail::SpamAssassin uses lazy evaluation where possible, but if you plan to fork() or start a new perl interpreter thread to process a message, this is suboptimal, as each process/thread will have to perform these actions.
Call this function in the master thread or process to perform the actions straightaway, so that the sub-processes will not have to.
If $use_user_prefs is 0, this will initialise the SpamAssassin
configuration without reading the per-user configuration file and it will
assume that you will call read_scoreonly_config at a later point.
If $keep_userstate is true, compile_now() will revert any configuration
options which have a default with __userstate__ in it post-init(),
and then re-change the option before returning. This lets you change
$ENV{'HOME'} to a temp directory, have compile_now() and create any
files there as necessary without disturbing the actual files as changed
by a configuration option. By default, this is disabled.
Output some diagnostic information, useful for debugging SpamAssassin problems.
Syntax-check the current set of rules. Returns the number of syntax errors discovered, or 0 if the configuration is valid.
Destroy this object, so that it will be garbage-collected once it goes out of scope. The object will no longer be usable after this method is called.
Find a rule-support file, such as languages or triplets.txt,
in the system-wide rules directory, and return its full path if
it exists, or undef if it doesn't exist.
(This API was added in SpamAssassin 3.1.1.)
Copy default preferences file into home directory for later use and
modification, if it does not already exist and dont_copy_prefs is
not set.
Used for daemons to keep a persistent Mail::SpamAssassin object's configuration correct if switching between users. Pass an associative array reference as either $source or $dest, and set the other to 'undef' so that the object will use its current configuration. i.e.:
# create object w/ configuration
my $spamtest = Mail::SpamAssassin->new( ... );
# backup configuration to %conf_backup
my %conf_backup = ();
$spamtest->copy_config(undef, \%conf_backup) ||
die "config: error returned from copy_config!\n";
... do stuff, perhaps modify the config, etc ...
# reset the configuration back to the original
$spamtest->copy_config(\%conf_backup, undef) ||
die "config: error returned from copy_config!\n";
Note that the contents of the associative arrays should be considered opaque by calling code.
Return the list of plugins currently loaded by this SpamAssassin object's
configuration; each entry in the list is an object of type
Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin.
(This API was added in SpamAssassin 3.2.0.)
HTML::Parser
Sys::Syslog
See also <http://spamassassin.apache.org/> and <http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/> for more information.
Mail::SpamAssassin::Conf(3) Mail::SpamAssassin::PerMsgStatus(3) spamassassin(1) sa-update(1)
See <http://issues.apache.org/SpamAssassin/>
The SpamAssassin(tm) Project <http://spamassassin.apache.org/>
SpamAssassin is distributed under the Apache License, Version 2.0, as
described in the file LICENSE included with the distribution.
The latest version of this library is likely to be available from CPAN as well as:
E<lt>http://spamassassin.apache.org/E<gt>