getting spamassassin to work

[Julian Field]

At 05:49 24/10/2002, you wrote:
>I've got 4.02-2 running on Solaris with sendmail and Sophos, and that part
>is working great.  However spamassassin doesn't seem to be doing anything.
>How should I configure it if I want to use spamassassin but don't want
>either spamassassin or mailscanner to do RBL checks?
>
>The scores I'm seeing suggest that AWL is working but nothing else seems
>to be adjusting the scores.  I just sent a message with several spam phrases
>and it came through untouched.
>
>In spam.assassin.prefs.conf I have
>skip_rbl_checks 1 (the rest is default).
>
>In mailscanner.conf I have (for spam-relevant settings):
>Spam Header = X-MailScanner-SpamCheck:
>Spam Score Header = X-MailScanner-SpamScore:
>Spam Score Character = s
>Spam Modify Subject = yes
>Spam Subject Text = {Spam?}
>High Scoring Spam Modify Subject = yes
>High Scoring Spam Subject Text = {Spam!}
>Spam Checks = yes
>Spam List = none
>Spam List Timeout = 10
>Max Spam List Timeouts = 7
>Is Definitely Not Spam = .../etc/rules/spam.whitelist.rules
>Is Definitely Spam = .../etc/rules/spam.blacklist.rules
>Use SpamAssassin = yes
>Max SpamAssassin Size = 50000
>Required SpamAssassin Score = 5
>High SpamAssassin Score = 15
>SpamAssassin Auto Whitelist = yes
>SpamAssassin Timeout = 30
>Max SpamAssassin Timeouts = 20
>Check SpamAssassin If On Spam List = yes
>Always Include SpamAssassin Report = yes
>Spam Score = yes
>Spam Actions = deliver
>High Scoring Spam Actions = deliver
>Log Spam = yes
>
>
>My test message (without the body) came through like this:
>Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2002 22:55:52 -0400
>From: Steve Barber <steveb at cme.nist.gov>
>Subject: spam test
>To: steveb at cme.nist.gov
>Message-id: <3DB76138.5040108 at cme.nist.gov>
>MIME-version: 1.0
>Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
>Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT
>X-MailScanner: Found to be clean
>X-MailScanner-SpamCheck: not spam (whitelisted), SpamAssassin (score=-18.8,
>        required 5, AWL)
>
>Note that there's no SpamScore: header.

That's because the score is less than 1. It can't print a negative number
of "s" letters.

>Right now my whitelist and blacklist rules just return default no ...
>
>I just turned off auto white listing and now the test mail just
>comes in with a score of 0.

This looks like a nasty SA problem. My best advice would be
1) Delete the auto-whitelist (probably in ~root/.spamassassin)
2) Re-install SpamAssassin from the .tar.gz distribution.

>Also: I'm having big problems with check_mailscanner and
>check_mailscanner.solaris.  My non-standard pathnames are somewhat
>long and this causes the strings to be longer than ps will show,
>so the greps fail.  I'm still working on a fix.  Used to work with
>4.00.0a13.  My fixes will probably use (and help manage) the pid files.

The check_mailscanner script are a pig to write and make work reliably.
Unfortunately I don't currently have much option other than to supply
something that makes a starting point and leave the rest as an exercise for
the reader.

If you get better versions working, I would be grateful if I could put them
in the distribution.
--
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