Setting up SpamAssassin on 10.3.9 Server

[nitefall]

I have tried a couple of different walk throughs on setting up SpamAssassin on Panther server (10.3.9) but inevitably something doesn’t work each time. Does anybody have a way they know works? or perhaps that can help me begin to troubleshoot what I have been doing?

[nitefall]

I am looking for a reliable way to get spam assassin set up on 10.3.9 server. It needs to work.

I have tried so many walkthroughs… I want one that has a person behind it, who can help me through what seems the inevitable snags.

[heavyboots]

Well, I debated responding to this since my response it so OT, but finally decided to toss it in the hopper, just in case it’s useful. Feel free to ignore it–it doesn’t actually pertain directly to installing SpamAssassin.

Having said that…

IMHO, if you’re going to set up your own spam filter anyway, you might just consider assp instead. Fairly easy to set up and changes practically nothing about the default install (mostly just the port that postfix listens on).

http://assp.sourceforge.net

Here’s what the relevant portion of my master.cf file looks like after I changed the port. There may have been changes to the main.cf file for postfix too, but I can’t recall anymore because I’ve tweaked that a lot compared to what it looked like in default mode anyway.

# service type  private unpriv  chroot  wakeup  maxproc command + args
#               (yes)   (yes)   (yes)   (never) (100)
# ==========================================================================
# Copy/paste smtp line, change to 225, set assp to forward to 127.0.0.1:225 in web config
225      inet  n       -       n       -       -       smtpd
#smtp      inet  n       -       n       -       -       smtpd 

ASSP 1.1.2b1 (yes, beta1 but 3 months of stable operation would suggest it’s fine to use) is the best version out. It’s in the CVS at sourceforge.net. The main improvement is that it adds graylisting, which currently stops about 90% of all spam engines in their tracks. The downside of graylisting is that unrecognized ips are delayed an extra 5 or 10 minutes before they can try and send mail to you.

Well anyways, it’s just a thought. Personally, last time I tried to set up Spam Assassin (admittedly years ago now), it was hard to set up and hard to maintain. ASSP has always been pretty simple and useable for us, particularly since most of the config is done from a nice web interface. Worst case scenario is that you have to rebuild the bayesian db from time to time if it gets exceptionally confused.

Best o’ luck!

[Author]

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