How do I configure customized scores for SpamAssassin rules?

The purpose of this article is to advise MDaemon administrators with the ability to manually configure scores for SpamAssassin rules.

For example, if we receieve an email processed by the Spam Filter and review the X-Spam-Report: header, we see the following;

X-Spam-Report:
* 1.0 BAYES_999 BODY: Bayes spam probability is 99.9 to 100%
* 0.8 HTML_IMAGE_RATIO_02 BODY: HTML has a low ratio of text to image area
* 0.0 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message
* 1.4 MISSING_DATE Missing Date: header

In this case, we see the the BAYES_999 rule is scoring only a single point. If you want to manually change this rule to another score;

1. Navigate to the \MDaemon\SpamAssassin\rules directory.
2. Open the local.cf file in a text editor.
3. Verify that the rule you are trying to modify is not already in the local.cf file.
   • If score SPAM_RULE # is already listed in the local.cf, then modify the value here rather than creating a new one.
4. At the bottom of this file, add score BAYES_999 # (replace the # with the value you would like).
5. Save the file
6. Restart the Spam Filter