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05/12/2003 Archived Entry: "A lesson in Spam 3"

This weekend I did the unexpected and wipe my computer clean and installed Redhat 9. Normally I don't go for the newest releases, but I decided that I should enjoy my home system a little more and the bugs in RH7.3 were dragging me down badly. So far it's been quite clean and stable (crosses fingers).

As part of that, included a complete fresh install of Spamassassin, and this time it included switching mailservers. Previously I was using Exim...now I'm using Postfix. Some pros and cons there...Exim is highly configurable, but extremely complicated (note to Exim fans: you may disagree all you want, but no one yet has given me a very simple <10 line description of how to write a director. Not all the ins-and-outs of it, but just a rough outline that is understandable. When that happens maybe I'll reconsider.). Postfix is still quite configurable, but quite readable. Postfix's big flaw is absolutely awful website organization and lack of decent documentation. Or more to the point, they rely on other sites that may or may not be functional for their documentation. Relying on your users to bring up important issues is one thing...relying on them to provide all your How-Tos is another. On top of that is that they don't even have a good complete list of that external documentation. I searched like mad for a decent, simple, how-to on integrating Postfix and SpamAssassin and eventually found one, but only by looking at about the 14th page of Google search results. The page I found was http://www.dulug.duke.edu/~mstenner/sa-docs/setup.html. Clean, simple, nice.

A point...Google operates on the concept that if a link is good and cool and useful people will link to it. If you find a useful link somewhere deep in Google's bowels by a search - give that site a boost by linking to it. Of course, Google is failing a little by being overwhelmed by the intense cross-linking inherant in blogs and is likely going to have to implement a -noblogs switch to its engine.

Anyway, the day after I get SpamAssassin 2.53 installed, 2.54 comes out. Supposedly worth an upgrade, though I haven't done so yet.

I've still got a small problem I haven't worked out yet...'spamassassin -r' fails, with a "Warning, unable to report spam" error. Apparently there is another missing detail in SpamAssassins docs that talks about razor and how to connect with it. The Postfix documentation project needs help. If I get some time I'll get something together, though hopefully stuff I post here helps.

Replies: 3 comments

Unfortunately not my problem in this case. I don't even have a .razor directory. :( Greg Posted by Greg @ 06/26/2003 10:43 AM PST

The error "Warning, unable to report spam" is produced becasue you didn't install either of the reporting services supported by the new spamassassin. You can see more information by running: spamassassin -r -D < message.text If you install either razor or pyzor the message will go away, and you will be able to report spam. There is an excellent article on this at: http://www.steidler.net/uptime/archives/000408.html Posted by Brian G. Peterson @ 08/18/2003 09:05 AM PST