1 How do I write my own rules? is there a tutorial someplace?
Yes there is a tutorial someplace, or a least a fairly decent howto on the subect.
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/mkettler/sa/SA-rules-howto.txt
2 Spam changes with time, which means the tests should be updated. How to I get the current tests performed? ie can I simply copy the new .cf files from a newer version of spamassassin? or do I have to reinstall completely? or is there some place where new tests are stored for public use?
Reinstalling completely is generally the best practice. The rulesets are heavily dependant on the code the ship with, since the improvements in the code (ie: fixes to html parsing) change the rule scores and how the rules themselves behave. Using a scoreset from a newer version of the code on one which is buggy could have disastrous results.
In this fictitious example, the version with a HTML parsing bug would have rule scores that reflect that behavior. This may cause some spam rules to score very low because the bug causes false hits in normal mail. On the other hand the scoreset from the version without the bug would reflect the lack of false hits, and the score of the rule could be significantly higher.
Becuase the code affects the rules, and both affect the scores, the three aren't really separable in any sane way. A lot of people have tried to compare SA to a virus scanner and want "signature updates", however, in reality SA bears little resemblance to a virus scanner. Virus scanner signatures identify a virus with a single signature match. SpamAssassin's code and rules work together to compute a score indicative of how closely the message resembles spam. The entire system works together in a balanced fashion. Because of the balance revolving around the GA score tuning process each and every rule impacts the score every other rule, and how SA strips and pre-parses various parts of the message impacts all the rules as well.
3 I don't see any evidence that RBL checks are being made in my spam headers. How can I make sure the RBL checks are being done?
run spamassassin with debug output on
spamassassin -tD <sample-spam.txt
Most commonly people forget to install the Net::DNS perl module, which is optional for SA to work, but required for RBLs.
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