SpamAssassin/MS: coordinating several installations

[David Lee]

A request for hints and tips...

At our site (university) we run SpamAssassin, under MailScanner, across
several machines (resilience, load-balancing etc.) on the campus boundary.
The default SA ruleset has proved reasonably effective, but we would like
to start tailoring this.  This means letting a small number of our
department (university I.T. Service) staff be able to specify SA rules,
and having these rules applied to, and maintained on, the set of machines,
in a consistent way.

The salient points here are:

1. The staff maintaining the SA ruleset won't be those who install and
   maintain the systems and software (they'll be "User Services" rather
   than "Systems Group").

2. Maintenance of a consistent SA ruleset across several machines (change
   one, change all).

3. Sanity checking of data-entry for ruleset: suppose badly formatted
   data (SA rule spec.) is attempted.

My initial thoughts are to expand our local "Makefile" mechanism that
already handles other email-related table-maintenance across these
machines.

Any "best practice"?  Or "custom and practice"?

--

:  David Lee                                I.T. Service          :
:  Systems Programmer                       Computer Centre       :
:                                           University of Durham  :
:  http://www.dur.ac.uk/t.d.lee/            South Road            :
:                                           Durham                :
:  Phone: +44 191 334 2752                  U.K.                  :