SpamAssassin as a Relay Server - how can I make it better?

[Ken Versteeg <kv...@autofusion.com>]

Hi,
 
I'm running SpamAssassin-2.55 through Amavisd-new-20030616 and Postfix as a
mail relay server.  After running through SpamAssassin (where Subject and/or
Headers are modified), mail messages are passed on to an internal Exchange
server for final delivery.  
 
When the system was set up, I basically followed Scott Henderson's document
"Creating a Spamfilter Relay Server"
http://www.geocities.com/scottlhenderson/spamfilter.html
<http://www.geocities.com/scottlhenderson/spamfilter.html> 
 
The system works ok, but there is room for improvement.  First of all, I get
too many false positives (i.e. any email from a yahoo.com account is tagged
as ***SPAM***), which tends to annoy my users.  My workaround has been to
manually add these addresses to a whitelist file (at the user's request).  
 
in /etc/amavisd.conf:
    read_hash(\%whitelist_sender, '/etc/whitelist_sender');
 
A better way would be to have whitelists per user.  Then I could write a
front-end to allow users to modify their own files.  Is this possible?  Can
someone show me an example of what a per_user_whitelist would look like, and
how I would need to modify the amavisd.conf file?
 
Also, can anyone point me to good documentation on the sa_auto_whitelist
feature?  How does it work?  Would it be appropriate for my configuration?  
 
 
Thanks for any feedback/assistance.

Ken Versteeg
 

Re: SpamAssassin as a Relay Server - how can I make it better?

[Steve Thomas <li...@sthomas.net>]

On Tue, Sep 21, 2004 at 11:34:08AM -0700, Ken Versteeg is rumored to have said:
> 
> I'm running SpamAssassin-2.55 ...
>  
> ...Thanks for any feedback/assistance.

The first thing to do is upgrade to the latest release version, which is 2.64. Do that, then see how it goes. There were a LOT of improvements made between the 2.5x and 2.6x releases and I'll bet that most of your problems disappear if/when you upgrade.


-- 
Steve Thomas -=*=- sthomas.net
Registered Linux User #281447