Re: Email Research Results

[Olav Vitters <olav vitters nl>]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 04:41:23PM -0600, Christer Edwards wrote:
> I thought I would share some of what I've figured out about the email
> server so far. Maybe some of the veterans can shine some light on the
> edges, and give us all a better picture.
> 
> As has been mentioned, the sa-update cron job has been commented out
> for some time. This was due to it "not working" (I've yet been able to
> find a cause, and haven't yet tried running it again to verify). The

Since discovered it actually works.

> concern with turning it back on is that it'll clobber any existing
> profiles. From what I can gather, sa-update pulls down spam profiles
> into /var/lib/spamassassin/3.xx/, and these can be updated frequently.
> On my production Debian stable mail server, sa-update is part of the
> default cron.daily/spamassassin script.

/etc/cron.d/sa-update can break amavis (amavis used to go down a lot)

The real cronscript is in /etc/cron.d/spamassassin

I've forgotten that I changed/did that.

Further, we use spamassassin so do NOT start spamassassin service, it is
pointless (amavis does spamassassin directly, in-process I mean).

> This /var/lib/spamassassin/ directory also has profiles for what
> appear to be all the lists managed on this box. Many of these seem to
> be standard, default list-name.pref/ folders, and the modify time on
> these files is 2004-2005.

Just do what you think is best.

> I think what I would like to try and do is tar up the
> /var/lib/spamassassin/ contents as an archive/backup, and run
> sa-update. Hopefully this will simply update the profiles (which don't
> seem to have been updated in years!), and all will be well. If there
> is a connection issue or something else related to sa-update I'll
> better be able to troubleshoot it after running it (sa-update -D for
> debug output).

As per above, sa-update actually is running. I just thought it was
disabled due to error output from the script, but apparently, that is
not the case (bad memory:)

> Also, the rules-du-jour script that was mentioned seems to be
> deprecated at this point. It appears that it is simply a bash wrapper
> around an update system to pull community spam profiles from the
> http://rulesemporium.com website, which is no longer being maintained.
> I don't think use of this script is going to help us much anymore.

Please remove traces from it then, to clean up our configuration.

-- 
Regards,
Olav