auto-whitelist woes

[Brent Clark <br...@gmail.com>]

Hi

I recently installed spamassasin on my freebsd test machine. For the 
likes of me, I keep getting this message, and I dont know how to fix it.

Aug  6 17:06:43 spamassasin spamd[63534]: auto-whitelist: open of 
auto-whitelist file failed: locker: safe_lock: cannot create tmp 
lockfile 
/nonexistent/.spamassassin/auto-whitelist.lock.spamassasin.eccotours.local.63534 
for
/nonexistent/.spamassassin/auto-whitelist.lock: No such file or directory

If anyone could assist, I would really appreciate it.

Kind Regards
Brent Clark

Re: auto-whitelist woes

[Matt Kettler <mk...@verizon.net>]

Brent Clark wrote:
> Hi
>
> I recently installed spamassasin on my freebsd test machine. For the 
> likes of me, I keep getting this message, and I dont know how to fix it.
>
> Aug  6 17:06:43 spamassasin spamd[63534]: auto-whitelist: open of 
> auto-whitelist file failed: locker: safe_lock: cannot create tmp 
> lockfile 
> /nonexistent/.spamassassin/auto-whitelist.lock.spamassasin.eccotours.local.63534 
> for
> /nonexistent/.spamassassin/auto-whitelist.lock: No such file or directory
>
> If anyone could assist, I would really appreciate it. 

Looks like you're running spamd as root, and spamc is getting called as 
root. To avoid the risky task of scanning mail while holding root 
privilges, SA setuid's itself to the "nobody" user. However, nobody 
doesn't, and shouldn't, have a writable home directory.

If you're doing a per-user config (ie: procmailrc), that's probably fine 
and you'll only get that for mail delivered to root's mailbox. That 
shouldn't be a problem unless you alias lots of mail to root, in which 
case you should consider aliasing it elsewhere.

 If you're doing a system wide config that always calls spamc as root 
(ie: some milters, etc), I'd suggest creating a user for spamd to run as 
and passing that as a -u parameter to either spamc or spamd.