ending the spam.assassin.prefs.conf madness.

[Matt Kettler]

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Richard Edge wrote:
> Thanks Matt. As mentioned in another message I am using 3.1 not 3.01. It was
> a typo on my part. I have removed antidrug.cf. The spam.assassin.prefs.conf
> suggested renaming the local.cf file so that it wouldn't be used. Are you
> suggesting then that it be used to disable certain SpamAssassin
> functions/tests?
> 

I'm suggesting, that the advice in spam.assassin.prefs.conf is dangerous. I have
no idea why Julian suggests this, as it's a BAD IDEA.


Among other things, spam.assassin.prefs.conf should not contain any privileged
or administrator options.

These options work in this file on some versions of SA, but this is largely
accidental because currently only the spamd code strictly enforces all aspects
of the privilege parsing rules.

According to the documentation of spamassassin, many of the options that Julian
has in spam.assassin.prefs.conf should be ignored, and may well be ignored in a
future version.

In particular, use_auto_whitelist has proven unreliable if declared in
spam.assassin.prefs.conf under 3.0.x. It only seems to work if declared in the
place the docs for 3.0.x tell you it needs to be. At the site config level i


IMNSHO, spam.assassin.prefs.conf should _ONLY_ contain options that you want to
use under MailScanner, but not when using the command line. Fundamentally this
is a user_prefs file, and should be treated as such. It is NOT a local.cf
replacement.

Using your local.cf for your site-wide settings guarantees that these settings
will properly apply to sa-learn, and spamassassin --lint, without requiring you
to remember to use -p /etc/MailScanner/spam.assassin.prefs.conf every time.

Very often people add bayes_path statements to spam.assassin.prefs.conf, but
fail to pass -p to sa-learn. In this case, all their manual training becomes
useless, as it goes to the wrong place.

Currently I've reduced my spam.assassin.prefs.conf to be empty except for
timeout adjustments.

I'd strongly suggest mailscanner users think long and hard about their options
placement, and avoid using spam.assassin.prefs.conf for settings which really
belong in local.cf. Treat this file not as a "master config" but as a way of
customizing SA's behavior for MailScanner.

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