Re: [Evolution] SpamAssassin with Evolution

[Jack Veenstra <veenstra SandCraft com>]

Yes, that's it.  My home directory is mounted on the mail server (so
that it can read my .forward file).  But I installed spamassassin as
root on my local Linux box (which has a local filesystem for / ) and
that is why the mail server could not find /usr/bin/spamassassin.  The
mail server has its own / filesystem and spamassassin is not installed
there.  I have asked my sysadmin to install it.  In the meantime, I can
work around this (I bet) by putting spamassassin in my home directory
and changing my .procmailrc file to use a pathname to the copy in my
home directory.

Using Evolution filters to call spamassassin does not work as well
because then the mail headers do not get updated.  The best I can do
with Evolution filters is to sort the mail into a separate "Spam"
folder.  This is still useful, but I would be missing the extra headers
that spamassassin adds that gives the "score" and the specific reasons
why an email message was classified as spam.

Thanks for your help!

Jack V.


On Wed, 2003-03-12 at 15:00, guenther wrote:
> cheerio,
>
> > Here's what I know about mail getting to my machine.  Mail to our
> > company ("SandCraft") is delivered to one machine for the entire
> > company.  (Each person has their own mailbox file, of course.)  All the
> > mail is stored in one directory on the mail server machine.  I can
> > access my mail using IMAP from my local Linux machine in my cube or I
> > can access it directly using a Unix path that is automounted over NFS.
> > The pathname is something like /net/blah-blah-blah/mail/veenstra.
>
> Looks like that local mail server is the mail-exchanger for your domain
> (running an SMTP server) or uses fetchmail to get the mail to your local
> net.
>
> Both, the SMTP server and fetchmail, normally respect a .forward file,
> if it finds it in the users home directory -- that means /home has to be
> mounted on that machine.
>
> I suspect, you don't know about that, do you? ;-)
>
> Furthermore I suspect, your home directory isn't at the local machine in
> your cubicle, but on a server mounted locally.
>
>
> > With the .forward file I mentioned above (that explicitly forwards the
> > mail to "cat" and "spamassassin" in addition to procmail), I can see
> > that the .forward file is invoked when Evolution fetches mail using
> > IMAP, but is not invoked when Evolution fetches mail directly from the
> > NFS-mounted file.
>
> > That's about the extent of my knowledge.  Somehow, using IMAP in
> > Evolution causes the .forward file to be invoked.  (Another possibility
> > that I just thought of is that the mail got delivered while I was
> > experimenting with this and that the .forward file was invoked by the
> > software on the mail server when the mail first arrived.  Maybe
> > Evolution had nothing to do with it.)
>
> I seriously doubt, Evo evaluates the .forward file -- thats a task for
> the MTA (mail transport agent), not the MUA (mail user agent).
>
> The MUA (just a complicated, techie acronym for a mail client ;-)
> weather it is Evo or any other client just lets you organize your mails
> and has nothing to do with the transport.
>
>
> It really looks like your mail server recognized the .forward file and
> the mail came in, when you were testing.
>
>
> > In any case, I'm still experimenting with this.  I'm going to look into
> > using a program called offlineimap that was recommended by several
> > people on this mailing list.  Maybe I can get spamassassin to work with
> > offlineimap.
>
> offlineimap only is for synchronizing your local machine with the IMAP
> server and having all the mail locally, so you can work offline. That
> wont fix that problem.
>
>
> If my assumptions of your network are true, it gets obvious, why
> spamassassin wont work with your .fetchmail and .procmailrc settings:
> You have installed spamassassin on your local machine and not on the
> machine with the MTA.
>
> Two ways to get that running:
>
> - Get the root account for your mail server. ;-) Or just bug your admin
> to install spamassassin.
>
> - Have spamassassin locally on your machine (or your account) and use
> Evo filters to use your local spamassassin.
>
>
> How to use spamassassin with Evo filters is mentioned several times,
> just search the archives.
>
> Hope, that gets you fly...
>
> ...guenther