Mark Williams wrote:
Hi All (just joined, so please be gentle;-) ),
I have just installed spamassassin v3.0.4 in a test environment (which
is a mirror of the live environment) and have a number of questions,
which I can not see within the manuals/support documentation.
Firstly, this is my configuration:
Server: Linux (RH9.0), with spamassassin installed from
spamassassin.org web site using "make" etc.... (not RPM's). This
machine then runs both IMAP and POP3 for clients. MTA is sendmail
Client(s): Windows XP. All running Windows XP and MS Outlook 2000. All
users connct to POP3 Server (on Linux machine) and use PST files to
download their e-mail(s).
General: Setup is such that spamassassin is site wide (not per user) -
as per management request. All working fine at the moment - just about
to "switch on bayes"
Questions:
(q1) Given that this is a site-wide installation, how do I get the
requisite 200 e-mails (spam/ham) for spamassassin to work with? Where
should I put these (an individual mailbox)?
Doesn't matter where you put them, what you need to do is feed them to sa-learn
--ham and sa-learn --spam. After sa-learn has examined them and added tokens to
it's bayes DB, the emails are no longer needed.
You'll need to do your sa-learn runs as the same user your mail scanning gets
executed as. Since you're using sendmail this will likely be root.
However, if you use spamd, it will be very averse to scanning mail while running
as root, and will setuid itself to "nobody" to prevent security holes. The home
directory for "nobody" isn't writable by nobody, so SA won't use bayes while
this is going on. (And don't fix it by giving nobody a home dir that it can
write to! Many processes use nobody and expect it to be homeless. Giving it a
homedir can weaken your system's security in the event an exploit occurs.)
What you'll want to do in this case is create a separate "spamd" user, and add
"-u spamd" to your spamd start up. Then when you want to learn mail, su yourself
to spamd.
