SpamAssassin wildcard "?" not supported by Sonic.net?

[larrysw]

For the past month or two we've been receiving a huge number of spam messages from email addresses like:
[email protected]. All of these spam messages have a two-letter second-level domain name. According to some websites I've found, SpamAssassin supports two wildcards: "*" for a string of characters of any length, and "?" for zero or one character. So I should be able to block the aforementioned email address and others like it with [ *@*.??.* ]. But when I try that I get the message that [ "*@*.??.*" contains invalid characters. Please try again ].

Am I doing something wrong, or does Sonic.net simply not support the "?" wildcard feature of SpamAssassin? If the latter, is there any hope of Sonic adding that capability?

Thanks in advance!
LarrySw

[jerrielm]

Hello!

I am sadly not finding any information on the wildcard ? setting. Do you have a link to it?

Best Wishes!

[larrysw]

https://spamassassin.apache.org/full/3. ... _Conf.html, mentions the "?" wildcard in several places. From the Whitelist and Blacklist options section:
"Whitelist and blacklist addresses are now file-glob-style patterns, so [email protected], *@isp.com, or *.domain.net will all work. Specifically, * and ? are allowed, but all other metacharacters are not.

I found a more complete description at: https://www.experts-exchange.com/questi ... Rules.html,
"You can use multiple blacklist_from directives or multiple addresses in a single directive to blacklist several addresses. You can also use an asterisk (*) as a wildcard for zero or more characters and a question mark (?) as a wildcard for zero or one character, much as you would to specify filename patterns in a shell."

Unfortunately, Sonic.net does not currently support the "?" wildcard feature of Spamassassin.

[jerrielm]

Hello!

I do not believe that Spamassassin uses the ? anymore. The articles you are referencing are pretty old and reference to an older version of Spamassassin. I would suggest trying to lower the spamassassin's hit score to a lower number to see if this helps with catching more spam.

Let us know if this helps at all.

Best Wishes!

[larrysw]

Thanks for your message. You may be right that SpamAssassin no longer supports the "?" wildcard, but I can't imagine why they would stop. All of the Apache documentation seems to be aimed at developers and ISP's rather than end users like me, so it's hard to find the answer. There are a number is ISP's that use SpamAssassin that have end-user instructions that include the "?" wildcard, but I can't tell the how current their documentation is in every case without becoming there client.

Thanks for your suggestion, but lowering the score won't solve the problem. I wish I could automatically block (delete) any message with a score of 10 or above without it going to graymail, like I can by blocklisting addresses, but that possibility isn't supported by Sonic either. I really don't want to deal with messages that are so obviously spam that they go to graymail. I just want them blocked so I never see them, even in graymail.

[jerrielm]

Hello!

There are settings to change any mail going to greymail to get deleted, but that could cause any false positives to be deleted as well.

Best Wishes!