Don, some thoughts inline..
Don Levey wrote:
If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing multiple times and expecting a different result, what is it when you're doing the same thing multiple times, expecting the same result, and you get DIFFERENT results?
Sounds like the definition of computer sciences to me ;-)
[snip]
Here's what I want to do with them:
Sounds like the setup I have here (with the exception of pyzor) but I run it on BSD instead of Fedora. Some comments below...
* The spamd/spamass-milter processes should not run as root (user 'spamassassin').
I gather from your previous mail that you already run this as "spamassassin". Make sure it owns the bayes files defined by bayes_path. I created a subdirectory owned by the user and let SA get on with it.
* I want a single set of user preferences/bayes DB.
While additional user preferences could in theory be OK,
I want only one Bayes DB.
OK, the prefs in /etc/mail/spamassassin/*.cf and the bayes BD in bayes_path then.
* As the above may mention, I want to use the Bayes DB for learning and auto-learning.
Should work fine as long as the user running spamd owns the directory/files used by bayes.
* I want tagged spam to rewrite the subject.
* I want to attch the original message to the report.
looks like that's set up fine, judging by your local.cf
* I want to use RBLs for things not covered otherwise in sendmail
(i.e. for URLs in the messages)
Make sure you have the perl Net::DNS stuff installed. Check with 'spamassassin -D --lint, look for:
debug: is Net::DNS::Resolver available? yes
* I want to use Razor/Pyzor
OK. Haven't bothered with them yet.
* Eventually, I may drop egregious spam examples,
but I'm not sure I want to do that yet.
Well, it can be done if you choose to.
What seems to happen is that I can get some subset of these things, but not all at once. Additionally, while I often think I've got things working correctly, they appear to change randomly from working to non-working.
Can you be more specific? What's not working? Any error messages in messages/maillog/&c.
The last point, on dropping spam, seems to be happening anyway. From what I can tell, anything with a score greater than 15 is being rejected automatically. This is seriously reducing my spam load.
That may well be a function of how SA/sendmail are configured on Fedora?
As I mentioned last week, I was getting "autolearn=failed" when BAYES_00 was the only rule that hit. If I got ANY other rule that also hit, autolearn did not fail. At least part of the problem there had to do with creating the lock file for the Bayes DB; Even though I thought I was running as root, and root owned the directory in question (/etc/mail/spamassassin) I needed to open the permissions in order for things to work correctly.
I'd imagine that spamd runs as root only for long enough to create the priv'd socket it needs, and then drops privs. I have everything in /var/bayesdb/bayes_* and /var/bayesdb is 755 owned by 'spam' user (which runs the milter/spamd). /etc/mail/spamassassin is 755 owned by root. No problems..
From what I see now, this is because if root is running it then the usershifts to 'nobody'. This is damn inconvenient. So, I've tried to shift to using user 'spamassassin' by using the "-u spamassassin" switch on both spamd and spamass-milter. When I do this, though, I can't actually read the user_prefs file for user root. But why am I even trying to open it for root, when spamassassin is the UID?
Why not combine the user_prefs and the local.cf, and move the whitelist somewhere where 'spamassassin' user can read/write to it?
The biggest problem right now is that for some reason message rewriting has stopped for spam messages. The header is tagged correctly, but the message is never rewritten. From my local.cf file (below), it looks like this should be happening. I don't know of any change I made which could account for this, and indeed this seemed to happen overnight, when I didn't do anything.
[snip]
The config looks ok to me, but I'm no expert. Any error messages in /var/log/maillog (or wherever on Fedora), or in the output from spamassassin -D --lint?
http://www.eruditer.org:6080/spamassassin/local.cf http://www.eruditer.org:6080/spamassassin/root-user_prefs http://www.eruditer.org:6080/spamassassin/sysconfig-spamassassin http://www.eruditer.org:6080/spamassassin/sysconfig-spamassassin-milter
Can't get to those URL's, timeout...
Cheers! Craig.
