I am running exim 3.35 in debian. We were using spamassassin 3.0, but we
have been having a lot of trouble with spam getting through. Some gets
caught but a lot doesn't and over time it gets worse and worse. The
person who originally set up our mailserver and spamassassin left the
company a while ago and it's been nothing but trouble since then. Part of
the reason from what I've been able to gather is that the bayes database
keeps breaking itself. I cleared the database before, and retrained it
with a bunch of spam and ham and it seemed somewhat improved for a while.
However, the way our system was set up was that whenever anybody got spam
they would forward it to a spam email address and sa-learn would
automatically learn from the mail sent there. I learned that this is an
ineffective way to handle this because the headers all get re-written when
users forward their spam, in addition to the fact that over time the
database gets very little ham and tons of spam and eventually the database
gets more and more ineffective.
The spam levels are getting high again, users are complaining, and so today
I did an apt-get spamassassin to upgrade to version 3.1.0. I then used
the configuration tool at http://www.yrex.com/spam/spamconfig.php to create
a new local.cf and replaced the old one, which was outdated even for our
previous version. Now however, when I try to start he spamassassin
daemon I get the message: SpamAssassin Mail Filter Daemon: disabled, see
/etc/default/spamassassin and I'm really not sure what's wrong there.
As you can tell i'm a complete SA newbie and my exim experience is somewhat
limited as well so I'm pretty much starting at the bottom of the learning
curve. I haven't been able to find any very complete or concise
information about SA on the net, even the SA web page has a lot of scattered
and outdated information so I'm not sure where to go from here to get this
working. Any advice would be very very much appreciated.
Thanks!
-Jeff
