This is draft 4 of the HOWTO-WIN32-SpamAssassin The main changes
- lotsa syntax corrections - AutoWhiteList FIXED! - EventLog options for Spamd included The remaining issues (but not so big as before) - Whether the maintainers of SpamAssasin want to integrate this (with appropriate checks for OS) stuff or whether this should all be maintained separately. HINT HINT!<g>. - Spamc, getting a compatible client for Win32 - Razor, workaround for ALARM - SpamProxy hasn't been tested and probably will never work. A lot of the modules req'd don't operate on Win32. However, one could write a VB or C SMTP proxy and just use the spamc code (if this ever comes to fruition). - nmake TEST doesn't work. How much anyone cares is a good question. Looks like it would be a pain to fix, but maybe not. I will finally post this on the web shortly after any comments, and post the URL here. mike USING SPAMASSASSIN WITH WIN32 Draft 4, [EMAIL PROTECTED] THE BUILDS WE USED ActivePerl Build 631 (1/2/02) SpamAssassin 2.11 SpamAssassin 2.20 (reported by others to work) Razor Agents 1.19 These were tested on Win98SE, Win2000, WinNT. LIMITATIONS: 1. SPAMC is not currently compiled for Win32, so spamassassin must be run in "serial mode". 2. Razor is unreliable, and needs a workaround for ALARM. 3. spamproxy untested. It looks like it isn't gonna work with Win32 though. 4. nmake TEST always fails. 5. A few installation quirks, which are covered below But it does work very well within these parameters! WARNING: DON'T USE WINDOW 9x/ME FOR SPAMASSASSIN! Use WinNT/2K/XP ONLY. Preferably with NTFS volumes. It IS possible to get it running on Win9x, but Perl acts unreliably on such platforms. During install you will find all kinda weirdisms. The primary one being every time PL2BAT calls, it will fail. You'd have to run these all manually (not a big deal) and hit CTRL-Z everytime the install "hangs" with NMAKE. Many more weirdisms (fork doesn't work well, or flock or link/unlink) make Win9x not the way to go. PART I: Installing Perl 1. This is very easy. Go to http://www.activestate.com, and select the ActivePerl download. Choose the MSI installer version. NOTE: If you have to use the NON-MSI version, that's fine. Download it, unzip it and run INSTALLER.BAT. It mostly works the same. 2. Double click the MSI file and run it. All of the default options are fine. Don't worry if the Perl installer seems to take a really long time. Wait at least 10 minutes before worrying. 3. Open a DOS box and type PERL -V to verify all is well. 4. In subsequent sections, it will be assumed that Perl was installed in C:\perl. Make appropriate changes if necessary. PART II: Installing NMAKE 1. We need NMAKE to build Perl modules 2. Obtain from ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/Softlib/MSLFILES/nmake15.exe 3. Extract the files, and place them in C:\perl\bin PART III: Installing the needed Modules, part I. We do this using the Perl Package Manager, rather than CPAN when possible, as it downloads the best versions for Win32. Basic method of operation: 1. open dos box. 2. Type PPM 3. At the PPM> prompt, type install <modulename> 4. To exit PPM, type QUIT, when you are done For SpamAssassin itself, we need only one module, Net::DNS, so we'd type install Net::DNS In the RAZOR section, we'll discuss installing a few more modules. Part IV: Obtaining Spam Assassin Go to http://www.spamassassin.org, choose download, and get the ZIP file distribution. Use WinZIP or other ZIP extractor, and extract the ZipFile off the root. For SpamAssassin 2.11, for example, this will create Mail-SpamAssassin-2.11 off C:\ We'll refer to this directory as the SPAMSOURCE directory below. PART V: Pre-install Open a DOS box, go to the SPAMSOURCE directory and type PERL windows_install.pl (This probably isn't at all useful actually. I think it is for the Cygwin folks) PERL makefile.pl PART VI: Getting the NMAKE to work, Part I Here's where we start to see quirks, most of them easy to fix. We will go through each error message one by one until the NMAKE compiles. (The main reason to do this is to achieve better understanding what works and what doesn't, so if a new branch of SpamAssassin changes things...) 1. Open a dos box and go to the SPAMSOURCE directory. 2. Type NMAKE 3. It will fail, complaining that TOUCH cannot be found. It may also complain about spamd/spamc. REASON: TOUCH isn't a Windows command. Also genning the HTML docs from the POD file confuses the Windows command interpreter WORKAROUND THIS: Open MAKEFILE (SPAMSOURCE directory) in NotePad, and find pm_to_blib: spamassassin doc/.made Change it to pm_to_blib: spamassassin which will skip this section. (See CLEANING UP THE QUIRKS). Save the file. 4. Try NMAKE again! 5. It will (most likely) fail again, complaining that CL is not recognized. REASON: One component of Spamassassin is spamc, the client piece of a neato way to really speed up SpamAssassin. But most of us don't own Visual C++, and so we don't have a C compiler handy. Unix people have life easy :) WORKAROUND: Well, if you really need spamc, you gotta get a C compiler. Otherwise, open MAKEFILE in Notepad again, and find $(CFCC) $(CFCCFLAGS) $(CFOPTIMIZE) spamd/spamc.c \ -o $@ $(CFLDFLAGS) $(CFLIBS) Comment these lines out by placing a # character at the BEGINNING of each line. Please re-read the last sentence - if # isn't the very first character the line will NOT be commented out properly. 6. Run NMAKE again. It should complete (the error about blib\script\spamc is fine, and occurs because we never compiled spamc) PART VII: Getting NMAKE to work, Part II Here we get NMAKE INSTALL to work properly. NMAKE TEST will never work, as there are too many whacked modules at this point. Oh well. 1. Open a DOS box and go to SPAMSOURCE directory. 2. Type NMAKE INSTALL 3. You will see a failure right after the mkdir -P command REASON: 3 issues come up now. The first is that mkdir -P has no analogue. We'll use MKDIR instead. Second some of the paths for the rule directories won't work as is. Finally, some of the installation routines will not work to copy configuration files, so we need to work around that too! WORKAROUND 1: Open MAKEFILE, and change all mkdir -P command to simply mkdir (eg mkdir -p $(DEF_RULES_DIR) to mkdir $(DEF_RULES_DIR) WORKAROUND 2: Also, find DEF_RULES_DIR = $(PREFIX)/share/spamassassin LOCAL_RULES_DIR = /etc/mail/spamassassin and change them to DEF_RULES_DIR = $(PREFIX)\share\spamassassin LOCAL_RULES_DIR = \etc\mail\spamassassin WORKAROUND 3: Finally, change these lines inst_cfs: $(LOCAL_RULES_DIR) $(DEF_RULES_DIR) $(DEF_RULES_DIR)/user_prefs.template $(LOCAL_RULES_DIR)/local.cf migrate_cfs for file in $(RULES) ; do \ $(CP) rules/$$file $(DEF_RULES_DIR)/$$file; \ done $(DEF_RULES_DIR)/user_prefs.template: rules/user_prefs.template $(CP) rules/user_prefs.template $(DEF_RULES_DIR)/user_prefs.template $(LOCAL_RULES_DIR)/local.cf: rules/local.cf [ -f $(LOCAL_RULES_DIR)/local.cf ] || $(CP) rules/local.cf $(LOCAL_RULES_DIR)/local.cf migrate_cfs: [ ! -f /etc/spamassassin.cf ] || $(MV) /etc/spamassassin.cf /etc/mail/spamassassin/migrated.cf [ ! -f /etc/mail/spamassassin.cf ] || $(MV) /etc/mail/spamassassin.cf /etc/mail/spamassassin/migrated.cf to inst_cfs: $(LOCAL_RULES_DIR) $(DEF_RULES_DIR) $(DEF_RULES_DIR)/user_prefs.template #$(LOCAL_RULES_DIR)/local.cf migrate_cfs # for file in $(RULES) ; do \ # $(CP) rules/$$file $(DEF_RULES_DIR)/$$file; \ # done $(DEF_RULES_DIR)/user_prefs.template: rules/user_prefs.template $(CP) rules/user_prefs.template $(DEF_RULES_DIR)/user_prefs.template $(LOCAL_RULES_DIR)/local.cf: rules/local.cf [ -f $(LOCAL_RULES_DIR)/local.cf ] || $(CP) rules/local.cf $(LOCAL_RULES_DIR)/local.cf migrate_cfs: # [ ! -f /etc/spamassassin.cf ] || $(MV) /etc/spamassassin.cf /etc/mail/spamassassin/migrated.cf # [ ! -f /etc/mail/spamassassin.cf ] || $(MV) /etc/mail/spamassassin.cf /etc/mail/spamassassin/migrated.cf (We are basically commenting out sections that would fail to copy files correctly. Don't worry - it's groovy) 4. Run NMAKE INSTALL - all should be well now. PART VIII: CLEANING UP THE QUIRKS 1. First, manually copy the files in rules directory to \etc\mail\spamassassin, which should now exist. This copies the default rules nicely. This is NEEDED for SpamAssassin to work. 2. Next, find \perl\bin\spamasasssin.bat, and add at the beginning SET RES_NAMESERVERS=ipaddress , where ipaddress is the ipaddress of your DNS server. If you have more than one, add additional ones, separating with a space character. This is needed for all RBL lookups - the Net::DNS module is not currently capable of checking the Windows registry, so we have to "help it" 3a. Open up NotePad, and type this in: REM Run from the top of the Spam Assassin install directory mkdir \spamdocs call pod2html spamassassin. --outfile \spamdocs\spamassassin.html call pod2html spamd\spamc.pod --outfile \spamdocs\spamc.html call pod2html spamd\spamd. --outfile \spamdocs\spamd.html call pod2html spamproxy\spamproxyd. --outfile \spamdocs\spamproxyd.html call pod2html lib\mail\spamassassin\conf.pm --outfile \spamdocs\conf.html call pod2html lib\mail\spamassassin\permsgstatus.pm --outfile \spamdocs\permsgstatus.html call pod2html lib\mail\spamassassin\persistentaddrlist.pm --outfile \spamdocs\persistentaddrlist.html call pod2html lib\mail\spamassassin\smtp\smarthost.pm --outfile \spamdocs\smarthost.html call pod2html lib\mail\spamassassin.pm --outfile \spamdocs\spamassassinclass.html 3b. Save this file as POD.BAT in the SPAMSOURCE directory. 3c. Open a DOS box, go to SPAMSOURCE and type POD. This will generate the HTML docs for SpamAssassin, and place them in \spamdocs. This works around the faulty TOUCH/POD2HTML script issues we originally disabled. 4a. Ok, we will try a test. It will fail, proving life is weird <g>. >From the SPAMSOURCE directory, type PERL -S "spamassassin" -P < sample-spam.txt I'll bet you you will get a "getpwuid is unimplemented" error. 4b. Fixing this isn't too bad. Go to \perl\site\lib\mail. You'll find spamassassin.pm. It will be read-only (change this). Open it in Notepad and find return (getpwuid($>))[7]; change this to # return (getpwuid($>))[7]; PART IX: TESTING Create a temporary directory called TEST off the root. Copy the sample-spam.txt and sample-nonspam.txt files from the SPAMSOURCE directory. Open a DOS box. 1. Type spamassassin -P -D -t < sample-nonspam.txt > nospam.txt This should run fine, and when you look at nospam.txt the report should be hunky dory. 2. Type spamassassin -P -D -t < sample-spam.txt > spam.txt This should run fine and the report should label this as spam. Note the RBL check should register as spam as well. PART X: USAGE - You can process any MIME message by typing spamassassin -P < inputfile > outputfile - Adding a -e switch will set the ERRORLEVEL to non-zero for spam! Can you say "batch file"? - The -D switch adds very helpful debug comments. - The -t switch is TEST mode. All mail will have a report appended. It is good, to see what the report comes up with on non-spam stuff. - only free RBL lists are on by default. See the SPAMSOURCE README for more details on this, and the \spamdocs\conf.html file. - You can set your own preferences by editing the USER_PREFS file in .spamassassin. Use the settings documented in \spamdocs\conf.html (this is how you can manually add/remove whitelist/blacklist settings, turn off RBL, change the score value of something etc). In general, if at all possible use THIS file, instead of editing the global config files in \etc\mail\spamassassin. That way, the next time you update SpamAssassin, you won't have to merge your changes with the new global config files. Of course, you'll need to look at the global config files to know what parameters to change! Here's some examples (none of them recommended by default - this is for illustration purposes) # Sample USER_PREFS # # # This one says if it's FROM bill, it CAN't be spam! whitelist_from [EMAIL PROTECTED] # This one changes the default of MAPS (off, because you can't use it for free, to on) score RCVD_IN_RBL 1.0 # Mail that is pure HTML is normally given a score of 4.5 (and since the default # threshold to mark as spam as 5 this could be a problem. We change that below score CTYPE_JUST_HTML 2.0 # And that spam threshold of 5 is too harsh and flags stuff as spam incorrectly # too often! Let's make it 7.5! required_hits 7.5 # Finally, we like Russians. They use BASE64 text all the time, because of their # whacky character set, and SpamAssasin marks this as likely spam (score=3.2). # Let's change that score BASE64_ENC_TEXT 0.00 HERE ENDS WHAT I CONSIDER THE "MAJOR FUNCTIONALITY" ISSUES. Below, I discuss some of the remaining lingering issues, and how to at least partially resolve them. Proceed with caution! Don't bother continuing if you don't feel comfortable with hacking. PART XI: AUTOWHITELIST DOESN'T WORK The Auto-WhiteList is a neat optional piece of SpamAssassin. With the feature enabled, people who send non-spam are added to the "whitelist" - meaning they become increasingly less likely to have their mail falsely flagged as spam. Each time the address is referenced, it gets weighted a bit more in one direction or the other. It's kinda cool that SpamAssassin can "learn" as it goes along. It's activated with the -a switch, and the database file is stored in \.spamassassin . Unfortunately, as written, it DOES NOT work on Win32. The STATS/LINK/UNLINK functions of the NFS-Safe Locking in DBBasedAddrList.PM go down in flames on Win32 (always tries 30 times to get the lock, finds it stale and then fails). While one could simply disable that portion of the code, it would of course only be reliable if only one instance of SpamAssassin were accessing the database at one time. A most unsafe assumption, and not one that I'd make. If this is not addressed, you'll have to manually add whitelisted addresses to the configuration files. This is a little more tedious unfortunately, and there's no weighted learning (the score for the manual whitelist is -100 or so, so chances are everything will be accepted from that source). See the usage notes in Part X for hints on how to do this. Fortunately, there is a solution. However, no guarantees are made as to the stability/functionality of this fix. Use ONLY if you feel very comfortable hacking around. Do note that this would not be a good solution for Unix based platforms (which should run fine with the default code), as it is NOT NFS-Filelock safe. Don't worry about what that means. 1. We need to edit \perl\site\lib\Mail\Spamassassin\DBBasedAddrList.PM, which is normally read-only. Make it read-write, and open it in Notepad 2. Make these changes to the new_checker subroutine: 2a. Change open(LTMP, ">$lock_tmp") || die "Cannot create tmp lockfile $lock_file : $!\n"; to open(LTMP, ">$lock_file") || die "Cannot create tmp lockfile $lock_file : $!\n"; 2b. IMMEDIATELY after this line, insert these 3 lines: dbg("$$ Trying to get lock"); flock(LTMP, LOCK_EX) or die "flock failed for $lock_file"; dbg("$$ got lock"); $self->{is_locked} = 1; 2c. Comment out ALL of the next 20 or so lines, until just before the line beginning with: if ($self->{is_locked}) (in other words all the way through the close and unlink statements). 3. Make these changes to the finish subroutine: 3a. Change unlink($self->{lock_file}) || dbg ("Couldn't unlink " . $self->{lock_file} . ": $!\n"); to close LTMP || dbg ("Couldn't unlink " . $self->{lock_file} . ": $!\n"); (The implementation above will freeze the currently running thread of SpamAssassin until it get the lock. A better implementation of all this would use the flock with the LOCK_NB combination and try over and over for 30 seconds at 1 second intervals, before failing over to the read-only code. This would be pretty easy to change) PART XII: SPAMC (and thus SPAMD) DOESN'T WORK You need a C compiler to compile spamc.c. I've tried a few, and they didn't work because many of the libraries are unix-centric. I'm planning to try to write a simple open source VB solution. C would be better if someone would contribute this - the protocol is simple and defined in the README for SPAMD, and should be trivial for any one with some TCPIP experience. SpamC would be nice to get working. With it, you load the PERL libraries only once instead of EACH time a file is processed. Then SpamC calls Spamd via TCPIP (so they assumedly don't have to be on the same machine). Much more efficient for heavy mail processing. Considerably less memory intensive. Spamd itself I've got working, sort of. I think though it needs SERIOUS testing though. It certainly has a nasty habit of GPFing or closing weirdly on me occasionally. 1. Go to \perl\bin\spamd. and comment out these lines (we need to do this because ActivePerl can't handle SYSLOG at all well): use Sys::Syslog qw(:DEFAULT setlogsock); (near beginning of file) setlogsock('unix'); (middle of code) 2. Change my $uid = gwpnam('nobody'); to my $uid = 'nobody'; (this occurs twice, and we do this because gwpnam is not available on Win32) 3. Comment out all the lines inside the logmsg subroutine (which reference the nonexistent SYSLOG daemon) and replace them with print "\r\n"; print "@_"; A much better thing to do would be to send this to Win32::EventLog. I believe that this can be done with (untested, and just hacked out mentally): # insert at beginning of code use Win32::EventLog; # replace current logmsg routine with these lines my $EventLog; my %event=( 'EventID',9999, 'EventType',EVENTLOG_INFORMATION_TYPE, 'Category',NULL, 'Strings','@_', 'Data','SpamAssassin', ); $EventLog = new Win32::EventLog( 'SpamD' ) || die $!; $EventLog->Report(\%event) || die $!; $EventLog->Close; 4. Comment out these lines: logmsg "Still running as root: user not specified, ". "not found, or set to root. Fall back to nobody."; Otherwise "odd" things will occur. You won't like them. PART XII: RAZOR Well, this is a bit of a pain, and I doubt it will work reliably. Fortunately it is optional. Here are the considerations 1. To install, begin by installing all of SpamAssassin and getting everything working nicely. Don't proceed with this section until everything else works well! 2. Go back to PPM, and install these additional modules Net::Ping Time::HiRes Digest::SHA1 2. You will also need to install Mail::Internet, which is not currently available via PPM right now. Time to use CPAN, a much less friendly (to Windows users) utility. Open a DOS box, type perl -MCPAN -e shell You will be asked some fairly frightening and confusing questions. Ignore them, and mindlessly hit RETURN, until you are asked for some URLS to download stuff from. Choose some random sites. (Do make sure that NMAKE is recognized as being in \PERL\BIN when you are asked for your MAKE program though). Eventually you'll be at the CPAN> prompt again, from which you type install Mail::Internet, and all is hopefully well. You can then QUIT from CPAN. 3. Download the RAZOR package from razor.sourceforge.net, and ungzip and untar it (WinZip works well for this). Place the main package off the root. 4. Build it. Go to the Razor-subdirectory and type these commands in order: perl makefile.pl nmake nmake test nmake install It should all go pretty well. 5. Type razor-check at the DOS prompt. If you are unlucky like me, you'll get an "alarm function unimplemented in ping.pm". This isn't such a big deal - we installed a working Net::Ping library back in Part III (it's installed at \perl\site\net\ping.pm). But the ActivePerl distribution comes with the BAD version of PING as the default. Let's fix that. Go to \perl\lib\Net and rename ping.pm to badping.pm and all should be well (hopefully this working ping will be integrated into the core shortly). 6. Now we come to a bigger problem. The ALARM function is also used in SpamAssassin's razor lookup function. While we can disable it (and will), this might be a bad idea, as it could lead to "odd" timeouts and hangs if the razor server isn't up. So do at your own risk! The problem ALARM functions are located in \perl\site\lib\mail\spamassassin\dns.pm . There are two of them and they need to be commented out with a # at the beginning of the line. If they are not, SpamAssassin will run fine, but ALWAYS time-out on the RAZOR check. (Which would defeat the purpose of bothering to install Razor!) The ALARM function is also used in \perl\site\lib\mail\spamassassin\reporter.pm, when the RAZOR agents are contacted to report the Spam (optional -R switch). Similar workaround/problems there. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Games - play chess, backgammon, pool and more http://games.yahoo.com/ _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
