SURBL installation

[Stephen Swaney]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On
> Behalf Of Peter Bonivart
> Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2004 5:27 PM
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: SURBL installation
> 
> Today I installed the SURBL as packaged on FSL.com. Thanks Steve for
> making it easy. I had good use of the INSTALL file but I would like to
> point out a couple of minor issues.
> 
> 1. "perl -MCPAM" (note that it says CPAM, not CPAN) should be "perl
> -MCPAN -e shell" on line 9. CPAN easily pulls URI on the fly so there's
> little reason providing it if not also providing SpamCopURI for those
> who can't or don't want to use CPAN.
> 
> 2. Later it says to check for successful installation by looking for
> "debug: uri tests: Done uriRE". I had that output before installation
> too..? I didn't see any changes in the debug output after installation.
> 
> 3. In the list of files to remove you mention antidrug.cf. I don't think
> that is included in SURBL. Matt Kettler explained to me that it can't be
> either since it's using such complex RE that the zone file would be huge.
> 
> 4. I edited your cf-file to use the bitmask-combined multi-list instead
> since that's makes more efficient use of net resources. Less lookups,
> better cache hit rate. You may want to change the included file since
> SpamCopURI supports bitmasked results as of version 0.20.
> 
> 5. I also added the Phishing list that's only available using the
> multi-list.
> 
> I set all lists to 4 points and they are working beautifully! Since
> BigEvil grew tenfold a couple of weeks ago every MS process used 60 MB,
> I'm now down to 30 MB and the load average is around half of what it
> used to be. Very nice. Everyone should do this very easy upgrade. I
> regret not doing it earlier.
> 
> --
> /Peter Bonivart
> 
Peter,

I and the MS list reader's thank you for catching my typos and pointing out
the imporvements. I'll update and fix tonight. 

As Peter pointed out and people who watch the SUBL mail list now know,
Mail-SpamAssassin-SpamCopURI-0.22 is now available. This new release
provides multi.surbl.org, combined list support, for SpamAssassin 2.63 and
2.64. I'm off for the weekend but will try to re-package
Mail-SpamAssassin-SpamCopURI-0.22 as early as I can. 

For those of you who are not familiar with the clever bit-masking that the
multi.surbl.org server uses I highly recommend visiting www.surbl.com. My
hat is totally off to the SURBL team and the work that they have done to
help all of us beat spam.

On a side note, SpamAssassin 3.0 include naïve support for SURBL. We're
running SpamAssassin 3.0 pre-release 4 on our spam traps and it looks good.
MailScanner (recent versions) support for this release is solid and the
upgrade was very straight forward. Thank you Julian.

I'll detail what we had to do to upgrade to 3.0 on our web site as soon as
3.0 is released and we can test and document. Most of the details are listed
in the UPGRADE file in the release; a few are a bit more subtle. For those
who are running rebuild Bayes from a cron job that runs:

/usr/bin sa-learn -p /etc/MailScanner/spam.assassin.prefs.conf --rebuild
--force-expire

You will need to change the command to read:

/usr/bin/sa-learn --sync -D /etc/MailScanner/spam.assassin.prefs.conf

There are also changes that you may need to make in
spam.assassin.prefs.conf. There are new configuration settings and some of
your existing settings may cause errors.

SpamAssassin 3.0 also complains about one of the standard Rules_Du_Jour .cf
files but this will probably be straightened out before the final release.

Tracking down these errors was very simple using:

/usr/bin/spamassassin --debug -D -p
/etc/MailScanner/spam.assassin.prefs.conf --lint

The functionality of this command has been improved in SA 3.0. It now shows
the number of problems.
 
Well that's it for tonight
 
Steve

Stephen Swaney
President
Fortress Systems Ltd.
Steve.Swaney at FSL.com


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www.fsl.com

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