Hi, I've been using spamc/spamd as part of my mail filter, and I've run into a few problems with the interface it provides.
1. I want to start a spamd process (as myself) if one is not already running. At first I thought spamc should at least have an option to automatically spawn a spamd if necessary - this would be very clean for the end user. But lacking that, I thought it should be easy to write a script to run "spamc -x", try to start a spamd if there is a non-zero exit code, and run "spamc" again without "-x". I ran into two minor problems: "spamc -x" copies the message to standard output even if it fails to connect to spamd, which means I need to save its output to a temp file, then check the exit code, and cat the file only if the exit code was zero. Somewhat unnecessarily messy. Secondly, with -x and -R or -r, the exit code seems to be always zero, even when there is a failure, contradicting the man page. More messiness for the script-writer. Anyway, this is all work-around-able, but I imagine users would like to have something which doesn't require such heavy customization. (Ideally, there would be an option to spamassassin to cause it to use or spawn a server on its own...) 2. The default mode, where the original message is output as a mime attachment to a wrapper message, is not idempotent - it keeps adding wrapper messages each time it goes through spamc: $ < test-msg spamc -U .spamd-socket -x | wc -l 307 $ < test-msg spamc -U .spamd-socket -x | spamc -U .spamd-socket | wc -l 371 $ < test-msg spamc -U .spamd-socket -x | spamc -U .spamd-socket | spamc -U .spamd-socket| wc -l 435 So if one of my email accounts runs spamassassin automatically before forwarding to my main account, and I run it again, ..., well things get messy. Plus, this interacts poorly with other spam classification schemes, which may modify only the headers - so now my spam folder is a mixture of wrapped messages and normal messages, and it is difficult to go through and extract all the original bodies and basic headers. What I'm trying to say is that it would be nice to have a mode for spamc (and spamassassin) where only the headers of a message are modified. Sorry if any of these suggestions seem frivolous! I guess it would be redundant to say that spamassassin is doing a great job filtering my email. I'm just mentioning some things that I think would be helpful from an interface standpoint. Frederik
