Email Research Results

[Christer Edwards <christer edwards gmail com>]

Team,

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
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.

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.

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).

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.

Again, what I would like to do is backup the current
/var/lib/spamassassin contents, run sa-update (-D and/or --check-only)
to verify it's functionality, and hopefully get the profiles updated.

If sa-update doesn't work, or if it appears to cause problems, I can
untar the backup into place, revert the changes and keep digging.

Let me know what you think...

-- 
Christer Edwards