[NTLUG:Discuss] SpamAssassin

[David Venable]

Rick Cook wrote:

>Hello all,
>
>I have been "playing" with SpamAssassin at home with thoughts about setting 
>it up to run on ntlug.org. This would be of benefit to the mailing list 
>administrators and the few people who have ntlug.org email addresses. I 
>think all of the mailing lists are set to require subscription prior to 
>accepting a post (which adds to the mailing list administrator burden).
>
>Unfortunately, SpamAssassin seems to place an inordinate burden on my 
>PowerMacintosh Dual 1Ghz G4 on its 1.5M/128K ADSL line (several seconds to 
>process each message with "lots" of network traffic during the checking). 
>Does anyone have any suggestions for improving SpamAssassin's performance?
>
>Also, though it does not matter on ntlug.org, mail "gathered" by fetchmail 
>and fed my the SMTP server is treated as "local" and not scanned. If I fix 
>that, then mail that originates in my SOHO network also gets scanned as it 
>leaves. Not a desirable situation either way. Any suggestions on how to get 
>fetchmail to act like an external MTA?
>
>
>  
>
Are you running SpamAssassin through the spamd daemon? I found that on a 
server with just a few users accepting mail that it would drag the 
system down when each user called the spamassassin perl script directly. 
Once I switched to spamc/spamd, everything was cool. BTW, SpamAssassin 
is one of the best things that I've run accross, I went from an average 
of 75 junk emails a day to one or two.

Dave