[H-GEN] Spam Assassin

[Jason Parker-Burlingham]

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Tony Nugent <tony at linuxworks.com.au> writes:

> On Tue Oct 22 2002 at 16:20, Jason Parker-Burlingham wrote:
> > Cor.  This is a pretty nice bit of software.  I installed it a few
> SpamAssassin?  Yes it is, very nice.  It is also easy to install and
> keep updated ("perl -MCPAN -e "install Mail::SpamAssassin", 2.43 is
> the current version).

You're talking to someone who just a few days before took the almost
unprecedented step of installing Perl modules into /usr/local rather
than waiting for them to be packaged as he wanted them.  I haven't
seen anything to suggest that 2.20 (the version I'm using) has any
show-stopping bugs, have you?

(Seriously.  I'm running stable, and would prefer to keep it that
way[1].  Am I running something that's likely to break?)

> I'm also using it as part of a mail filtering subsystem that plugs
> right into sendmail itself (called mimedefang), and this filter is
> catching spam very, very nicely (along with viruses and other
> "undesirable" emails).

Right.  The rest of your message---which is full of good advice---is
predicated on two things, as far as I can tell:  1) that I'm getting
enough mail that I need better performance from SA and 2) that I want
to scan for viruses.

Well, I get mail via pop when I dial up, and maybe once a week or two
some mailing list or another will have a flurry of activity, and I'll
receive 100 messages all at once, at which point exim is configured to
simply queue them for later delivery.  I haven't noticed any unduly
high load so far, and don't really expect to.

Second, until I'm serving a network (this is just a single-user
machine right now) I don't see a need for virus scanning or
de-spamming other peoples' email.

> And calling spamassassin itself directly for each message is very
> expensive on system resources... I've seen peak cpu loads hit 100%
> when doing it like this.

Wow!  I'm running the local tests only, but I can't see that that
would have much effect.  I simply haven't seen SA being so
... aggressive.

> A much better way to do this is to have spamd running as a daemon
> (it listens on a local socket),

Please tell me it's a UNIX domain socket?

> | spamc -p 2222

Oh, bugger.  I'm assuming that's a port number.

>   The first test is a sanity check, emails over ~100k are rarely
>   spam and checking them is both resource-expensive and pointless.
> 
>   I already have spamd running on port 2222, started from my
>   ~/.bash_profile script (if it isn't aleady running).

Well, at least it isn't running as root.

To be honest, I am alarmed that SA does not turn on Perl's taint
checks (indeed, bug reports indicate it's not taint-clean).

> "formail -s" is a very useful thing that I've used myself on many
> occasions to split apart mailbox files and re-sort its contents :)

Yes.  It would have been worth installing procmail just to have
formail ready.

> And then there's Anomy::HTMLCleaner, which can do more magic... :)

I wasn't able to find that with the CPAN shell.  What is it?

jason

Footnotes: 
[1]  I'm using a number of services I haven't used extensively before,
     and it's all working *wonderfully* for a change, so I would
     rather not do an upgrade until I know it's a bit more solid.
     (Besides, until just a few days ago I had another user who didn't
     respond well to changes of any kind.)  I'm still in the middle of
     reconfiguring.

-- 
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| ``Ooooaah!                                                            |
|   I'm getting so excited about cheese-making I can't stand it!''      |
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