Mailscanner and SA 2.40

[Eric H]

On Wed, 4 Sep 2002, Derek Buttineau wrote:

> Anyone else tried this combination yet?

I just tried it yesterday. Basicly, the whole thing just fell apart and
quit working and I had to revert back to just plain vanilla sendmail.
However, I wouldn't be justified in jumping to any conclusions and
pointing any fingers because there are some other problems with my test
platform like rpm is hosed and its database corrupt or something, at any
rate rpm -qa and rpm --rebuilddb are dumping core. Also, being a relative
newbie to mailscanner and SpamAssassin I'm probably not doing things
right anyway.

Platform is a RedHat 6.2 box, running Sendmail 8.12.5 and I installed
mailscanner-3.22-12.i386.rpm with rpm -i. It had been running for almost a
week now and I was quite impressed with the accuracy of spam
identification and virus removal, though I noticed that certain types of
"teen girl" spam was scoring just below the 5 threshold. Now, this might
not be the correct way to upgrade SpamAssassin, but I grabbed the
Mail-SpamAssassin-2.40.tar.gz tarball and did the perl Makefile.PL;
make;make install routine and promptly got hosed.

So, I'm curious whether most folks use the mailscanner rpm to install
or if they use the MailScanner-3.22-12.tar.gz tarball and build and
install manually? I had initially started working with the tarball but
had a devil of a time figuring out where everything was supposed to go,
it seems the INSTALL docs are out of date. I really don't like depending
on rpms for anything I consider a critical component on a production
platform for a number of reasons both philosophical and practical. Don't
get me wrong, the rpm install is a great thing, in fact nothing short of
amazing, but it does depend on other things (like rpm actually working)
and the more dependencies you have the less suitable it is for production,
it just means there are more things that can go wrong.

Best Regards,
Eric