Configuring - local.cf and more

[ChrisWilbur <ch...@woodchipcomputers.co.uk>]

I'm clearly only just approcahing the bottom of the nursery slopes of this
learning curve...

1
I installed SA using apt-get install spamassassin on a Liux (?Debian?)
server, running procmail.
That's given me version 3.0.3.  I'm reluctant to risk breaking things.  Can
I easily upgrade to something more current?  (TOLD you I was on the nursery
slopes...)

2
All the defaults seem to be hugely high.  All of my spam is coming in with
scores of about 1.2 and up.  Oddly, all the false positives tend to be over
2.0; anyting between 1.3 and 1.9 is almost inevitably spam.  I'm clearly
missing a trick here.

3
I wrote some rules in my local.cf file - and they seemed to work just fine. 
Then they all seemed to stop.  Nothing I add to that file seems to have any
effect at all - even a line such as:

body TEST_RULE /e/
score TEST_RULE 0.01

I reckon that ought to trigger for every message with an "e" in it - but it
doesn't.
What did I break?
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Re: Configuring - local.cf and more

[Matthias Haegele <mh...@linuxrocks.dyndns.org>]

ChrisWilbur schrieb:
> I'm clearly only just approcahing the bottom of the nursery slopes of this
> learning curve...
> 
> 1
> I installed SA using apt-get install spamassassin on a Liux (?Debian?)
> server, running procmail.

Seems so. Unless you use apt4rpm or likewise ...


> That's given me version 3.0.3.  I'm reluctant to risk breaking things.  Can
> I easily upgrade to something more current?  (TOLD you I was on the nursery
> slopes...)

Version 3.1.7 is stable in Debian (Etch). I assume you are using Sarge.
Perhaps you want to upgrade your "Base System" before upgrading 
Spamassassin ...
(Follow upgrade guides Release Notes on debian.org)

-- 
Grüsse/Greetings
MH


Dont send mail to: ubecatcher@linuxrocks.dyndns.org
--

Re: Configuring - local.cf and more

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

ChrisWilbur wrote:
> 2
> All the defaults seem to be hugely high.  All of my spam is coming in with
> scores of about 1.2 and up.  Oddly, all the false positives tend to be over
> 2.0; anyting between 1.3 and 1.9 is almost inevitably spam.  I'm clearly
> missing a trick here.
>   
3.0.3 is rather old, it's not terribly surprising that a lot of spam has
learned to evade its ruleset.

You can try to compensate with extensive training using sa-learn and
add-on rules that are fresh from rulesemporium.com, however, as someone
else suggested, you might want to upgrade your whole debian so you can
get 3.1.7 as part of the stable release tree. Getting up to a recent
build would be considerably more effective.

(note: I'm no expert on debian)
> 3
> I wrote some rules in my local.cf file - and they seemed to work just fine. 
> Then they all seemed to stop.  Nothing I add to that file seems to have any
> effect at all - even a line such as:
>
> body TEST_RULE /e/
> score TEST_RULE 0.01
>
> I reckon that ought to trigger for every message with an "e" in it - but it
> doesn't.
> What did I break?
>   
Did you try spamassassin --lint? This should test your config files for
syntax errors. Some errors, like leaving the trailing / off a regex can
screw up the parser pretty badly and it winds up spitting out a good
chunk of the file following the mistake.

Also, if you're using the spamd/spamc pair, you need to restart spamd
for changes in local.cf to take effect.