[CentOS] Advice, Please.

Sat Feb 17 16:31:13 UTC 2007
Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>

On Sat, 17 Feb 2007, Phil Savoie wrote:

> I have a home setup where I am using Centos 4.4 as a sort of mail 
> server. This is what I have done.
>
> I have it configured to pop mail locally.  I have fetchmail 
> configured to dl from my provider my families mail through a cron 
> job and .fetchmailrc in their home directories.  They then pop the 
> server to retrieve their mail. They send their mail directly through 
> the provider.
>
> I have been relying on spamassasin on their local boxes to learn and 
> filter out the spam but find it is only doing about half of the job 
> even after months of training.
>
> I guess my question is this.  Is there a way to do further spam 
> filtering on the mail server incorporating my method of doing mail 
> or am I not just doing this right?

My experience is that the version of spamassassin that ships with 
CentOS 4 is simply out of date. What works best for me using the Dag 
Wieers/RPMforge version (currently at 3.1.7).

Semi-tricky is that fact that it requires some other packages as well. 
Here's my /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo (which also includes some 
packages unlikely to be of interest to you, like cfengine and 
conserver):

----- %< -----
# Name: RPMforge RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise 4 - dag
# URL: http://rpmforge.net/
[rpmforge]
name = Red Hat Enterprise $releasever - RPMforge.net - dag
mirrorlist = http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el4/en/mirrors-rpmforge
enabled = 1
gpgkey = file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmforge-dag
gpgcheck = 1
includepkgs = cfengine clamav clamav-db clamav-milter clamd conserver 
perl-Archive-Tar perl-IO-Zlib rpmforge-release spamass-milter 
spamassassin subversion
----- %< -----

Make sure the includepkgs list is all on one line. Then "yum upgrade 
spamassassin" should get you the new packages.

After installing the new spamassassin,

1. Run sa-update to grab the latest stock ruleset from
    updates.spamassassin.org, though I suggest you read the
    sa-update(1) man page first to understand what you're doing.

2. For each SpamAssassin user, at the very least, run (as that user)
    'sa-learn --import' to update their Bayes databases. It's probably
    most helpful to read the MIGRATION section of the sa-learn(1) man
    page. You'll most likely want to disable the fetchmail runs during
    the migration.

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> www.madboa.com