Thank you both for those replies. That confirmed exactly what I was looking for. Very helpful.
Karsten, concerning your note about sa-learn in different environments, I did a few more tests and it looks like the dovecot antispam plugin does not make any changes to the e-mail message and sa-learn treats the message the same as if it was run from the command line. But in my environment all learning will be routed through the plugin anyway. Thanks, Kareem On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 6:31 PM, Karsten Bräckelmann <guent...@rudersport.de > wrote: > On Wed, 2013-07-24 at 10:48 -0500, Kareem Dana wrote: > > I am using SpamAssassin 3.3.2 on FreeBSD 9.1. I'd just like to confirm > > that I can pipe messages to sa-learn. The following commands should do > > the same thing, correct? > > > > # cat spammail | sa-learn --spam > > # sa-learn --spam spammail > > Correct. > > $ formail -1 -s < mbox > msg > $ sa-learn --spam msg > Learned tokens from 1 message(s) (1 message(s) examined) > > $ formail -1 -s < mbox | sa-learn --spam > Learned tokens from 0 message(s) (1 message(s) examined) > > That confirms sa-learn accepts mail being piped in, and that there is > absolutely no difference to using a file as intermediate storage. > > > NOTE: Be careful of using sa-learn in different environments or ways in > parallel. For example via the dovecot anti-spam plugin, from a cron job > harvesting mbox files, maildir, processed through formail or even worse > an MUA... > > Slight modifications to the MIME structure can result in SA treating > them as different messages, learning twice. In fact, a mere (additional) > trailing newline at the end of the MIME message suffices. > > > > I have tested and they appear to be identical, but ultimately I will > > be invoking sa-learn through the dovecot antispam plugin > > (http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Plugins/Antispam) and their webpage has a > > whole section about how sa-learn does not support piped input and I > > need a wrapper script. I believe that is outdated, but I want to be > > absolutely sure that I can pipe mail to sa-learn and it will work > > properly. > > That claim appears to be based on reading the sa-learn documentation, > rather than actually trying it. No, wait, I do not mean to imply it is > bad to read the docs. Not at all. It is, maybe, just slightly inferior > to verifying something not mentioned equals not supported... > > I can confirm this works at least since SA 3.2, which IIRC even predates > the dovecot anti-spam plugin, let alone its documentation. ;) > > > -- > char *t="\10pse\0r\0dtu\0.@ghno > \x4e\xc8\x79\xf4\xab\x51\x8a\x10\xf4\xf4\xc4"; > main(){ char h,m=h=*t++,*x=t+2*h,c,i,l=*x,s=0; for (i=0;i<l;i++){ i%8? > c<<=1: > (c=*++x); c&128 && (s+=h); if (!(h>>=1)||!t[s+h]){ putchar(t[s]);h=m;s=0; > }}} > >
