To prevent spam from being quarantined to some non-accessible mailbox in Amavisd-new you must deactivate the quarantine command in etc/amavis/amavisd.conf. To do this, find (or add) the following variables in the etc/amavis/amavisd.conf file and set them so that they read:

$banned_quarantine_to = undef; # Setting these to undef disables the quarantine.
$bad_header_quarantine_to = undef;
$spam_quarantine_to = undef;

Also, find (or add) and set the following variables and values:

$final_banned_destiny = D_PASS; # (defaults to D_BOUNCE)
$final_spam_destiny = D_PASS; # (defaults to D_BOUNCE)
$final_bad_header_destiny = D_PASS; # (defaults to D_PASS)

I also set a few other variables in the configuration file to insure that Spamassassin’s ‘X-Spam-…’ headers were added to every email checked so that my Mail.app could handle the spam status.

$sa_tag_level_deflt = undef; # add spam info headers if at, or above that level
$sa_tag2_level_deflt = 5.0; # add 'spam detected' headers at that level
$sa_kill_level_deflt = 9999; # triggers spam evasive actions

$sa_tag2_level_deflt defines the score level.

Also, spam headers will not be written to the message unless the local domains are defined for amavisd-new. The easiest way to do this for me was to find the following array variable and edit it thus:

@local_domains_maps = ( [ ".$mydomain", 'sub.example.net', '.example.com' ] );

Do not change the “.$mydomains” entry. Change the other example domain names if you have more than one domain you are serving mail for – delete them if you don’t. Type exactly to provide fully qualified domain names and separate multiple domains with commas.

Our mail server is a Mac Mini with Snow Leopard (10.6.x) running postfix, dovecot, and amavisd-new with ClamAV and Spamassassin. Spamassassin is great at identifying spam, but I do not trust it to identify all mail accurately. I probably am not unlike you: I want to read the messages sent to me from friends and clients. Some of these messages have irreplaceable information and the last thing I want is to have it directed to a mailbox I can’t easily get to. I don’t like not seeing email coming to my mailserver.

I didn’t change the way amavisd-new handles viruses.