ending the spam.assassin.prefs.conf madness.

[Anthony Peacock]

Hi Julian,

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> 
> On 22 Nov 2005, at 10:17, Anthony Peacock wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> >> Julian Field wrote:
> >>> Therein lies the problem. I could run the "spamassassin" or
> >>> "sa-learn" script to try to find out, but I equally well won't
> >>> know where they are, they may not be on the $PATH (e.g. Solaris).
> >>>
> >>> But if we say I can find the "spamassassin" script (I'll work on
> >>> that), then which of these lines is the one that states the
> >>> directory I should be using? And what should the file be called?
> >>> Is it local.cf or something else? I need to get this right this
> >>> time.
> >>
> >> I would suggest using mailscanner.cf as a filename. This way you
> >> are unlikely to muck-up a user's already existing local.cf file.
> >>
> >> (SA will automatically parse *.cf in the site rules dir, so both
> >> will get parsed. Since parsing is in alphabetic order, and
> >> last-parsed wins, options in mailscanner.cf will over-ride options
> >> in local.cf)
> >
> > I would agree with this as a suggestion.  It would also mean that
> > the MailScanner sitewide config options would be picked up by the
> > command line SpamAssassin utilities.  That way when someone wanted
> > to test a email against SpamAssassin they would be using the same
> > configuration.  The same goes for using sa-learn.
> >
> > As well as doing this the comments at the top of the
> > spam.assassin.prefs file should make it clear that a new sitewide
> > .cf file has been created so that admins can check that it is not
> > overiding anything that is already set up and working.
> 
> I entirely agree. One request though: I have been trying to dig 
> through the SA data structures to work out how to get at the 
> properties mentioned to calculate the directory path names so I know 
> where to put the mailscanner.cf file. I can't figure it out.
> 
> Can someone (Matt perhaps?) please try and work it out for me? Can't 
> get my head around it today.

I did have a look at this briefly this morning, but had to move on to 
more pressing work matters.  I will have another look later.

The one thing I did find in the documentation is the definition of 
the search list that SpamAssassin itself uses:

http://spamassassin.apache.org/full/3.1.x/dist/doc/spamassassin.html#c
onfiguration_files

(Excuse the wrapping).

I haven't seen an easy way of getting out of the code the directory 
that SpamAssassin has decided to use.


-- 
Anthony Peacock       
CHIME, Royal Free & University College Medical School
WWW:    http://www.chime.ucl.ac.uk/~rmhiajp/
"Screens are sometimes called displays because they 
display stuff ..." - UNIX for Dummies.

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