[ILUG] Running spamassassin on a large number of email messages

[Francis Daly]

2008/9/11 Timothy Murphy <gayleard at eircom.net>:
> On Tuesday 09 September 2008, Timothy Murphy wrote:

>> I have a directory containing about 50,000 email messages,
>> of which I am sure over 95% is spam.
>>
>> What is the best (quickest) way of passing these messages through
>> spamassassin and deleting those that fail the test.
[snip]
> But surely there is an easier way of completing the task?
>
> As always, I await the valued advice of the ILUG guruship.

What am I missing?

"""
for m in *; do spamc -E < $m || rm $m; done
"""

"spamc -E" should return false if it thinks it is spam, and true otherwise.

If you don't like "rm", then "mv $m probably-spam-dir/" instead.

If "*" expands too much, then try

ls | xargs get-rid-of-spam

where get-rid-of-spam is the above line in a shell script without "in *".

I'm assuming a sane Maildir format, where filenames don't include IFS.

(This looks very like Kingsley's earlier suggestion. That's not a surprise.)

Good luck,

f