ending the spam.assassin.prefs.conf madness.

[Anthony Peacock]

Hi Matt,

> 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.

Thanks for eloquently expressing something that I have been meaning 
to write for a little while now.  I got bitten by the advice in the 
MailScanner spam.assassin.prefs file, until I realised that it should 
be considered a user prefs file, and not a replacement for local.cf.

I am all for making life easy and not having commands in lots of 
different places, but instructing people to delete local.cf is an 
oversimplification.  I now have a basically empty spam.assassin.prefs 
file, as I want most of the SA configurations to be applied site 
wide, whilst running the SA command line tools as well as running 
from MailScanner.  And some of the configuration commands are not 
valid in a user prefs file anyway.

I think it is a very good idea that Julian has created installs that 
can install and configure a complete MailScanner, SA, ClamAV and MTA 
setup 'out of the box'.  This makes life very easy for people 
starting from scratch, who may not have the knowledge and experience 
to stitch this all together.  However, this does cause confusion when 
somone wants to implement a feature of SA that cannot be configured 
in a user prefs file. (There was something recently, but I can't find 
it in the archives right now.)  

Please do not take this as a pop at Julian or any of the other 
contributors.  I just think it would be better to make the 
distinction between SA's different config files, rather than glossing 
over them.

-- 
Anthony Peacock       
CHIME, Royal Free & University College Medical School
WWW:    http://www.chime.ucl.ac.uk/~rmhiajp/
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that 
heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' 
but 'That's funny....'" -- Isaac Asimov

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