Well, here's my $0.02
For starters, is it realistic to think that someone charged with
implementing spamassassin on a mailserver does not know what spam is?
The first 2 sections are fluff and would be best replaced by a link to
wikipedia's spam entry, along with the warning "if you need to
read wikipedia to figure out what spam is you shouldn't be installing
spamassassin"
The 3rd section can be replaced with something saying:
for the purposes of this document the following definitions are
used:
fp - yadda yadda yadda
fn - yadda yadda yadda
greylist - yadda yadda yadda
in the shortest sentences you can write.
The real beginning of the document should start with "what is
spamassassin"
dkim does not belong in the "how sa works" overview
apple osx section is almost meaningless. Any osx server admin knows
they have to go under the hood to the osx command line to do anything
with their server. I'm not really sure why you have that in there
because you don't have any other distribution-specific info it appears.
Perhaps if you put several sections dealing with distro-specific
stuff that might be better to put the OSX stuff in.
vi is not really a good editor to tell a newbie to use. (I use
vi myself exclusively) There are easier editors for newbies
I get that probably you prefer vi and there's nothing wrong with
mentioning it but you shouldn't seem as though it's a requirement.
smartypants jokes telling people to block 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255
are not appropriate either. I guarentee there will be newbies who
won't get the joke and will actually try to do this. Also this
misses the fact that a lot of mailservers nowadays
are dual-stacked and run both IPv4 and IPv6.
My personal preference for writing "crash courses" is to pick a
specific *nix distribution and then detail an install on that.
There are many small details that are critical to get right to
have a successful installation, but you can't include these in
a giant crash course that covers all the major distros. Generally
people read these wanting to get something up and running quick
so they need the specific info
SA isn't really useful by itself it has to be run by something.
A lot of people use procmail to call SA on mail and you need to
detail that method. It also would help to detail calling SA with
spamass milter although that is sendmail specific so it may
not apply to all distros. And it would be a good thing to cover using a
front end quarantine manager like mailscanner although not to
go in depth since these typically are rather complex to get
working.
Ted
On 11/28/2011 10:28 PM, antiamoeba wrote:
Hi,
I'm currently working on a crash course for administrators as part of Google
Code-in. I would really appreciate it if you could provide any feedback for
this project. This is still a big work in process and multiple definitions
still need to be added/revised. Please let me know if you have any
suggestions or if I have understood anything wrong. I've attached a pdf and
a word document.
Thanks,
antiamoeba
http://old.nabble.com/file/p32879895/SpamAssassin.pdf SpamAssassin.pdf
http://old.nabble.com/file/p32879895/SpamAssassin.docx SpamAssassin.docx
