SpamAssassin Prefs File problem

[James Gray]

Shahid Hussain wrote:
> Thank you for taking your time for kind explanation, you have really nice
> server machine ;)

No problem.

> Our MailScanner system running on:
> 128MB ram, 6GB Hard-Drive, Intel Pentium III (498.34-MHz 686-class CPU) and
> 100Mbit connection. And time-out is set to 50 seconds (SpamAssassin Timeout
> = 50).

Ouch - 128MB is really not enough, even for a dedicated mail gateway
that does nothing other than e-mail.  With the cost of RAM being so low
these days, try upgrading to 512MB - 256 would be "OK" as long as you
tune your setup and disable anything else that's not needed on the
server (DNS/databases/DHCP....anything not needed to process mail).

> MailScanner will process any emails when its received.  I am not too sure if
> it using remote black-lists but I don't have dcc, razor, pyzor plugin
> installed (nor /usr/local/etc/MailScanner/spam.assassin.prefs.conf is NOT
> used).  How do I check if it using any remote black-lists?

Turn on the logging.  If you haven't installed Pyzor/Razor, they wont be
used, but SORBS, RFCI etc, may still be in use - set the scores for the
RBL's to zero and that will prevent spamassassin from using them.
Custom scores go in "spam.assassin.prefs.conf" or a customised ".cf"
file in the SpamAssassin site rules directory - the site rules directory
is set in MailScanner.conf.  Read the SpamAssassin::Conf documentation
on how to score rules and/or create your own :)

> Bayes is disabled in MainScanner.conf (Rebuild Bayes Every = 0)

That just prevents the Bayesian database from being rebuilt.  If you
want to disable Bayes you need to add the following line to
spam.assassin.prefs.conf:

use_bayes 0

> I only receive about 10/20 emails every 30-60 minutes and MailScanner is
> doing the job well.  But if I receive an email like 10/20 at the same time
> then MainScanner will acting crazy when I tested with
> http://www.gfi.com/emailsecuritytest/

OK - reduce the number of messages in a single batch and/or the size of
a batch (bytes).  Also with that sort of volume, you could get away with
as little as one child - no need to run 5 (default).  You can also
reduce the amount of data that is fed to spamassassin regardless of the
message size: ie, only feed it the first 10kB of a message, this wont
affect the score dramatically, but will reduce the load on your server
noticeably and speed up scanning.  All this has been covered a number of
times in the archives and the MAQ:
Archives: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/mailscanner.html
MAQ:      http://www.mailscanner.biz/maq/  (specifically section 9.0)

Please research your problems with those two sources :)  Saves your time
waiting for replies and saves bandwidth coz we don't have to say the
same stuff over and over....no offence to you.

Cheers,

James

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