The Lotus Domino servers in our environment are fronted by a small battery of
Exim Mail Transfer Agents (MTA) which use both SpamAssassin and
DSPAM to try and filter out as much rubbish (a.k.a. UCE) as
possible. Both tools insert a number of headers to indicate that a message is
Spam, but these SMTP headers are unfortunately invisible to a stock Lotus
Notes client: it cannot filter on them. So we use the Subject:
header, which
is modified to contain a magic word on which the Lotus Notes client can then
apply a rule and directly delete the message or move it into a Junk folder.
As a service to our users we wanted to create the rules in the mail
file automatically. Since a rule is a simple document, we thought we could
create the document in the PostOpen event of the mail file’s database
script. That was easy enough. There have since been reports of rules being
“messed up”, in as much as other rules have stopped working. Sometimes opening
and resaving the rules have fixed their handling, whereas at other times, only
disabling & deleting and subsequently recreating the rules has helped. Oh, and
Chris, if you are reading, I won’t say it again. * Pun
intended