DSPAM Utilities

Reporting New Messages in Quarantine

(1.1a)

I don't want my users to have to constantly wonder whether they have any quarantined messages. I also want to gently remind them to deal with messages that do get quarantined. So I built a simple system that works like this:

Once a day, I run a script that compares the timestamp on a user's quarantine area (joeblow.mbox) to the timestamp on a notification file (joeblow.notify).

If new messages have been quarantined since the last time the user was notified (or since the last time the user examined his/her quarantined message list), the user is sent an email message.

The message contains a link to the DSPAM CGI login page and instructions about how to deal with quarantined messages.

An example for user Joe Blow:

Sunday: A message addressed to Joe is quarantined.

Monday: Joe is notified that he has new quarantined mail. Joe is away and does nothing.

Tuesday: No additional reminder message is sent to Joe because no new messages have been quarantined.

Wednesday: Another message is quarantined.

Thursday: Joe gets another reminder message.
Later Thursday: Another message gets quarantined.
Later still on Thursday: Joe goes to his quarantine area and deals with the messages.

Friday: No reminder message is sent because Joe visited his quarantine area after the last message was quarantined.

You will need three things to make this system work for you.

This Bash script (report_spam_quarantine). I run it nightly via cron. It should be run as root.

A file that contains the text of the reminder message. Here's the one that I use.

You will need to patch dspam.cgi so that it will touch the notification file every time the user visits his/her quarantine area. Put one of these patch files into the directory that contains dspam.cgi and run it: Patch for DSPAM 3.2.x or Patch for DSPAM 3.4.x or (thanks to Michael Davey) Patch for DSPAM 3.8.x.

I run the script daily because my users are still in training mode and I expect that useful messages are going to get quarantined. Later, I may decide to run the script less often, perhaps once a week.

The script also generates a summary report that lists the users that were notified. This report is emailed to an address specified by a variable in the script file. This is an optional feature and can be disabled.

The author of this submission hereby releases any and all copyright interest in this code, documentation, or other materials included to the DSPAM project and its primary governors. I intend this relinquishment of copyright interest in perpetuity of all present and future rights to said submission under copyright law.