Re: harmless emails trigger rule EMPTY_MESSAGE, why and how to avoid?

On 2026-04-06 at 08:38:11 UTC-0400 (Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:38:11 +0200)
Gregor Zattler <[email protected]>
is rumored to have said:

> Hi Bill, thanks a lot, because of:
> * Bill Cole <[email protected]> [2026-04-02; 
> 19:58 -04]:
[...]
>> If SA scanned ANY of the body, EMPTY_MESSAGE would not hit. So it 
>> could
>> happen if your procmail rig is somehow only passing the headers to
>> spamc.
>
> The actual call to spamc is as simple as it get's:
>
> :0
> * < 500000
> * ! X-Ham-grfz-status:[ 	]+manual
> {
>     :0fhw

There it is.

>     | /usr/bin/env LANGUAGE=de spamc -t 300 -x
>
[...]
>
> Because of your hint prrocmail might
> only pass headers, I changed this to
>
> :0fw
>
> and since ~60 hours no emails were
> tagged with EMPTY_MESSAGE.  What I do
> not understand is, why not all emails
> were tagged EMPTY_MESSAGE then.

EMPTY_MESSAGE requires EITHER body text OR a MIME attachment, which the 
detection of a MIME attachment being done by looking for a non-text 
value in the Content-Type header. I haven't traced out the details, but 
it seems likely that anything multipart/* will hit __MIME_ATTACHMENT and 
so prevent a hit on EMPTY_MESSAGE.

>
> Anyway thanks a lot.

I am always happy to have helped.



-- 
Bill Cole
[email protected] or [email protected]
(AKA @[email protected] and many *@billmail.scconsult.com 
addresses)
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