Spam slipping through

[Randal, Phil]

Julian Field wrote:

>> You're possibly not picking up the sa-updated rules when running
>> SpamAssassin from within MailScanner.  Running spamassassin from the
>> command line will use them.
>>
>> At some point SpamAssassin was fixed so that the local state dir
>> included /spamassassin, e.g. /var/lib/spamassassin, and not /var/lib.
>>
>> See http://issues.apache.org/SpamAssassin/show_bug.cgi?id=4952#c11 .
>>
>> Try amending your MailScanner.conf to read like my config below
(which
>> has been tested and verified to use the updated rules):
>>
>> # The rules created by the "sa-update" tool are searched for here.
>> # This directory contains the 3.001007/updates_spamassassin_org
>> # directory structure beneath it.
>> # Only un-comment this setting once you have proved that the
sa-update
>> # cron job has run successfully and has created a directory structure
>> under
>> # the spamassassin directory within this one and has put some *.cf
files
>> in
>> # there. Otherwise it will ignore all your current rules!
>> # The default location may be /var/opt on Solaris systems.
>>
>> SpamAssassin Local State Dir = /var/lib/spamassassin
>>
>> Jules, can you fix the default MailScanner.conf to match reality,
>> please?
>>   
>Can I be reasonably sure that the sa-update will work? And what
triggers 
>it? Do I need another cron job to do this, or does SpamAssassin do it
on 
>its own? Please include me directly as my personal address in a Cc for 
>this one, I have been trying not to miss a deadline by too much, and 
>would still very much like to do a stable release on 1st Feb. It's been

>far too long since the last one. I want to include everything except
the 
>new p records in Postfix, so if there's anything that needs 
>fixing/changing, send it to me personally as soon as possible, as I
hope 
>to have some time this coming week to work on MailScanner. So I need to

>know the list of outstanding jobs!

I guess you have two choices.  The least obtrusive is to leave the
"Spamassassin Local State Dir" value commented out, as it is by default,
but corrected to mirror the change introduced in the middle of last
year.

Or you could put in a sensible default and trust sa-update.

Your call.

You already create an sa-update file in /etc/cron.daily, with it set by
default not to do anything.

It would be useful if MailScanner restarted its children when the files
in the Local State Dir change (if it is being used).

Because there has been past confusion about where the local state dir
should point to, it would be a good idea if "MailScanner --lint" did
some consistency check to make sure the appropriate directory structure
is pointed to by the "Spamassassin Local State Dir" parameter.  That
structure won't exist until sa-update is successfully run, but you could
come up with a suitable set of warnings.

Cheers,

Phil
--
Phil Randal
Network Engineer
Herefordshire Council
Hereford, UK