How well the anti-spam filter works depends on recognizing what is considered spam or not considered spam. The SpamAssassin filter can learn what is spam and what is not spam from messages that users specifically mark as Junk from their web client toolbar or Not Junk from the web client Junk folder. A copy of these marked messages is sent to the appropriate spam training mailbox.The Zimbra spam training tool, zmtrainsa, is configured to automatically retrieve these messages and train the spam filter. The zmtrainsa script is enabled through a cron job to feed mail that has been classified as spam or as non-spam to the SpamAssassin application, allowing SpamAssassin to ‘learn’ what signs are likely to mean spam or ham. The zmtrainsa script empties these mailboxes each day.
By default all users can give feedback in this way. If you do not want users to train the spam filter, you can modify the global configuration attributes, zimbraSpamIsSpamAccount and zimbraSpamIsNotSpamAccount, and remove the spam/ham account addresses from the attributes. To remove, type as:
zmprov mcf ‘’
Restart the Zimbra services, type zmcontrol stop and then zmcontrol start.
When these attributes are modified, messages marked as junk or not junk are not copied to the spam training mailboxes.
Initially, you may want to train the spam filter manually to quickly build a database of spam and non-spam tokens, words, or short character sequences that are commonly found in spam or ham. To do this, you can manually forward messages as message/rfc822 attachments to the spam and non-spam mailboxes. When zmtrainsa runs, these messages are used to teach the spam filter. Make sure you add a large enough sampling of messages to these mailboxes. In order to get accurate scores to determine whether to mark messages as spam at least 200 known spams and 200 known hams must be identified. The zmtrainsa command can be run manually to forward any folder from any mailbox to the spam training mailboxes. To send a folder to the spam training mailbox, type the command as: zmtrainsa server user pass spam [foldername] To send the to the non-spam training mailbox, type: zmtrainsa server user pass ham [foldername]