Hi there,

From the research I’ve done, this topic comes up like a bad penny every 6 months or so. I think I’ve done all the walkthroughs I could find on how to disable it, and yet I’m still getting bounces between my spam processing company (external to our organization) and our mail server. The latest that came through was from one of our customers, whose domain has been whitelisted since I set the server up, and who has all the proper records (because we set them up!) says:

“550 5.7.1 Message rejected for spam content - Rule #2151620 (Misc/General)”

What was sent to me was plain text, no spam in it at all. It had to do with their website and problems with redirecting pages.

When I look in the Postfix logs and at /rspamd on the server, they are stating that no action was taken, but the spam provider’s logs show that the message was rejected. So that’s hardly “no action”.

My rspamd actions are:

  • greylist = 90000
  • add header = 99800
  • rewrite subject = 99998
  • reject = 99999

As you can see, I want to let my spam provider do the filtering and virus scanning. It’s what we pay them to do, so we don’t have to keep up on an ever evolving list of threats and threat actors. And so far for the last 12 years, they have done it very well for us, so I have no reason to want spam filtering on my mail server.

I also get the impression that rspamd does not just do spam filtering, it also serves other purposes. I totally understand that, but a comprehensive walk through somewhere of how to disable spam filtering on mailcow would be appreciated. You can put a ton of warnings and disclaimers all over it for the non-IT Professionals out there.

Oh, I should have put this before… this is on mailcow-dockerized v2025-07 running on debian 12 in a virtualized environment that we maintain in a datacenter.

Thank you all in advance! Once we get a few of these little problems worked out, we plan to recommend this to customers and have each contribute to the cost of mailcow. I’m waiting to get these small problems worked through before I send ours in so my business partners don’t grouse about the donation before the smaller issues are worked out. :-)

Paul

  • DocFraggle replied to this.

  • anomaly0617 “automatically BCC all mail in or out to: [email address]” but I don’t find that in mailcow

    You can do this with the “BCC maps” settings on the mailcow configuration page

      • EETNyx

          Moolevel 69
        • Post #2

        Well,.. this message seams quite strange, i would think this come from your third-party anti-spam solution right? Number 550 should mean it’s permanent error and your third-party anti-spam solution is to be blame not Mailcow Rspamd,… If not please provide as whit more details,…

        Have something to say?

        Join the community by quickly registering to participate in this discussion. We'd like to see you joining our great moo-community!

        • DocFraggle

          • Community Hero
          Moolevel 307
        • Post #3

        anomaly0617 “550 5.7.1 Message rejected for spam content - Rule #2151620 (Misc/General)”

        I have to agree with @ETNyx, the above bounce message looks like it was sent by Barracuda and not by RSpamd.

        anomaly0617 my spam processing company (external to our organization)

        So are you using Barracuda for this? If yes, check with them to work out the bounces…

              DocFraggle No, and neither our customer, the spam filtering service (SpamHero) or us use Barracuda products, I have…. lets call them “strong opinions” about Barracuda’s products.

              WIth that said I’ve been looking more closely into what happened here. The customer uses SpamHero for both inbound and outbound messages. I can see in the outbound message logs where it was bounced for reason “blocked by rule #2151620” and when I click on it for more detail, I get “The specific details of our core filter rules are not something that our spam techs disclose. This is partially for security purposes, as a bad actor could use the information to get messages past the filters, but also because of agreements with filtering data partners that do not allow us to disclose the information.”

              So, I disabled this rule on the SpamHero side. Because if they cannot tell me (ultimately, I’m their customer) why they are blocking communication between my customer and I, I’ll just disable the rule in question.

              That covers this particular instance. But I’m running into other instances where I need to disable spam filtering on the server as well. In fact, one of the things I’m trying to get working is what in the Microsoft Exchange world we would call a journal mailbox. This is a mailbox that collects all the emails sent into or out of an organization for the purposes of accountability and archival. In our previous setup (we used ISPConfig with Dovecot, Postfix, etc.) they had a field for this in every user account, “automatically BCC all mail in or out to: [email address]” but I don’t find that in mailcow. I found where I could define a sender_map and a recipient_map file in postfix and then hash it (postmap) and restart postfix, but this hasn’t worked. I’m wondering if this is a dovecot setting I need to look into, or an rspamd setting since I see some chatter about someone writing a policy/rule in rspamd for this.

              Thank you both for responding!

                  anomaly0617 “automatically BCC all mail in or out to: [email address]” but I don’t find that in mailcow

                  You can do this with the “BCC maps” settings on the mailcow configuration page

                    Ah - found it with the help of another forum post that was in German, but after translating it and looking at the screenshot provided, I got it.

                    For those looking, this is under Email (dropdown, top right), Configuration, then in that menu, under “Address Rewriting” there is a section called BCC Maps.

                    Thanks @DocFraggle!

                    No one is typing