SM wrote:
At 07:22 06-11-2008, Joe Dragotta wrote:
I would presume that if the global procmailrc file, in /etc/,
forwards mail to Spamassassin, and the users have individual
.procmailrc files, in their home directories, which also forward mail
to Spamassassin, any mail destined for such a user would be filtered
twice.
Is that a correct assumption?
Yes.
So I'm probably wasting resources if my Spamassassin host is
configured as such?
Yes.
See http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/UsedViaProcmail for more
information about calling SpamAssassin from procmail.
Regards,
-sm
Thank you for succinctly answering my questions, and thank you to all
for your various input.
With the forwarding to SA active in both the system and user level
procmailrc files, I was noting some odd behavior. The system level
filtering was correctly tagging about 90% of the spam as spam and
sending it to /dev/null/, and therefore was not being delivered.
However some email was making it through for processing by the user
level procmailrc file, being again forwarded to SA, and then SA was
rewriting the subject to ID it as spam (the user_prefs file was not set
to send spam to /dev/null). Thusly, I was receiving a small amount of
email tagged as spam.
As it turns out, the user_prefs file has higher scores assigned to some
of the tests. Therefore the system level filtering was not identifying
the email as spam (correctly so), but when the user_prefs file was
invoked, by way of the second call to SA (by the user level procmailrc)
the email was being tagged as spam, due to the higher scores in user_prefs.
Not being very experienced in SA administration, I didn't know if SA
would process the same email twice, or if it kept track of message IDs
and only processed them once. Thusly, I needed to know whether or not
my originally described scenario would send the emails to SA twice, and
subsequently, if SA would filter them twice; which apparently is the case.
That being said, perhaps I could have better stated my original question
as, "Will SA filter the same email twice, if the email is forwarded to
SA twice?" ...but I digress.
In any event, I am moving to use the spamd/c combination, in lieu of
invoking SA from procmail.
<100% opinion>
It may be a gray area, but perhaps as a point of future reference (and
perhaps policy), it would seem that questions regarding the invocation
of SA using procmail are well within the topic of this group.
Otherwise, the above linked Wiki page
(http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/UsedViaProcmail), as well as the
other SA Wiki pages on how to configure SA with procmail, would probably
have to be removed, as they would be classified as off-topic, because
they deal with invoking SA from procmail.
</100% opinion>
Thanks again for the help,
--Joe
