SpamAssassin default rules

[Julian Field]

At 13:09 31/07/2002, you wrote:
>The local overide rules and scores are in
>/etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf. As well as the rules described above
>this file also includes local overides such as for "required_hits",
>which was raised today from 6 to 9, and for disabling blacklisting by SA
>as Peter Peters has done.
>
>If you maintain local rules in the way recommended by the SpamAssassin
>docs, and described above, BEWARE of the new "spam.assassin.prefs.conf"
>file provided by MailScanner. This file will overide any other local
>changes that you have made in the places recommended by the SpamAssassin
>docs.
>
>In our case the "spam.assassin.prefs.conf" file should be empty OR all
>lines should be comments OR the "SpamAssassin Pref File =" entry in
>mailscanner.conf should be null OR should point at (for this site)
>"/etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf".
>
>I would welcome Julian's comment/advice on this. I believe that the
>entry in mailscanner.conf for the "SpamAssassin Pref File" should have a
>"Health Warning" comment added and/or a bit more explanation about
>why/when it is needed.

That sounds like a very good idea. I had never quite got to the bottom of
what files SA uses from where and when. The spam.assassin.prefs.conf file
is mostly there for when you use "Compile SpamAssassin Once = yes", as you
then have to tell SA what file to load its config from. At the time I
couldn't work out where SA was looking for its files, and I couldn't be
sure they wouldn't vary between different OS's/versions, so there was no
single correct answer to which file to use. So I supplied my own in a place
I could safely predict.

Most people never change the SA rules anyway, so my solution worked for
most people, most of the time. But I agree that it's less than perfect if
you want to change the SA rules.
--
Julian Field                Teaching Systems Manager
jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk         Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science
Tel. 023 8059 2817          University of Southampton
                             Southampton SO17 1BJ