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

[Justin Mason]

Timothy Murphy writes:
> 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.
> 
> I've been following jm's suggestion:
> ----------------------------------------------------
> You could run
> 
>  spamassassin -t /path/to/maildir/new > mbox1
>  spamassassin -t /path/to/maildir/cur > mbox2
> 
> It'll output mboxes with the filtered versions of each message.  You then
> need to replace the maildir with the mboxes and remove the ones that
> match "X-Spam-Flag: YES".
> ----------------------------------------------------
> (One can hardly ignore the horse when he opens his mouth ...)
> 
> But the remainder of the process is rather long-winded in my case,
> and I am wondering what exactly I was expected to do.
> 
> I could write a Perl script to run through the mbox and delete  messages
> with the X-Spam header set.
> 
> I use kmail as my email reader, normally with maildir folders.
> What I have actually done is to create a Test account using mbox format,
> import the mbox files, and transfer the nice messages to a maildir folder.
> 
> But surely there is an easier way of completing the task?
> 
> As always, I await the valued advice of the ILUG guruship.

sometimes a GUI is the right way to do it ;)

I'd also use some form of mail user agent to do it.  In my case I'm still
wedded to MH, but mutt, or indeed KMail should work fine.

--j.