Junk mail filtering and forwarding

#1

I have an email address set up to forward, and that address has no associated user (or mail user) on my Dreamhost domain. I enabled junk mail filtering on that domain and according to my mail headers it’s working. However, since the address on that domain is just a forwarding address, I can’t login to webmail to to edit the whitelist and such.

How should I handle the junk filter settings for this address? My inclination is to mess around in my dotfiles, but I wanted to see if there’s a better solution. Thanks!

#2

This a real can of worms, due the the crazy decision to fit the JF half to mail addresses and half to mailboxes. I suggest if you can forego Junk Filtering on forwarded addresses, then do. Else note:

  • Support wrote in reply to my reports of problems like yours “[what] appears to be happening is that
    the junk filter does not like forward addresses”. Which I take to mean “may or may not work”.

  • In some cases you can log in to edit your whitelist because SquirrelMail login attempts to following forwardings, but it can fail to work so don’t rely on it.

  • If you’ve got multiple forwarding destinations, it’s anyone’s guess which one SquirrelMail will log you into - it doesn’t tell you which and you can easily end up changing settings for the wrong mailbox.

  • When you can’t log in to edit whitelist, the bigger problem is you can’t view/retrieve quarantine!

  • When you can, you’ll find the quarantine shows the wrong message From: address, which coupled with often wrong message time and not letting you see the message body, makes it very hard work.

  • When you can’t, try logging in to the mailbox direct under its server username followed by ! e.g. m1223876!@domain.com

  • TAKE GREAT CARE with quarantine “Move to INBOX” because it does nothing of the sort - it actually RESENDs the message to the SquirrellMail login address, meaning if there are multiple forwardings it will also go to the other destinations, and if you logged direct to an address-less mailbox, well you can guess…

Good luck!