[NTLUG:Discuss] SpamAssassin

[Rick Cook]

On Wednesday 02 July 2003 22:40, David Venable wrote:
> 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.
>


For a little more detail=>

I am running spamd.

My normal process has Exim routing mail through spamd using sa-exim. The 
sa-exim scripts attempt to bypass the spamd route for "locally generated 
mail". Cron jobs for each user (my wife and I) start fetchmail to grab mail 
from our normal pop server on a regular basis and then routes it for 
delivery using exim. Exim then places it in the local mail spool for each 
of us. Unfortunately, this fetchmail to exim handoff gets treated as a 
"local" mail request and bypasses spamd. Mail sent directly to my SMTP 
server gets routed through spamd as expected.

Since the fetchmail to exim route bypasses spamd, I currently have my email 
client, kmail, set up to filter incoming mail using a spamc to spamd 
connection. It is possible that this is the "burdensome" part of the 
process. I'll add an additional test case by having ntlug.org forward my 
rcook at ntlug.org mail directly to my home SMTP server for a while and see 
how that goes. I'll let you know.

BTW, I agree that SpamAssassin seems to be a great way to cut down on SPAM. 
So far, I have seen no false positives and the only Spam getting through 
are short mailing list administrator action requests.


-- 
Rick Cook