[CentOS] Spamassassin as root and pyzor

Fri Jul 18 10:26:31 UTC 2008
Hywel Richards <hywelbr at googlemail.com>

I've just set up a new mailserver using Centos5.2 
(sendmail+clamav-milter+spamass-milter).

I'm using the spamass-milter package from rpmforge 
(spamass-milter-0.3.1-1.el5.rf).

I notice that the default setup is to run it as root. I set up my 
previous mailserver on Centos4, and I can't remember if I did anything 
special, but on that machine it runs as user "sa-milt".

Is it safe/recommended to run spamass-milter as root? Does it in fact 
shed the root privileges or something like that when it actually does 
some processing anyway? Are there good reasons why I should leave it run 
as root (besides it being the least effort option)? I found a few 
discussions on this topic on the web but I have ended up confused and 
would appreciate some advice.

Ideally I would like a link to a webpage entitled "How I learnt to stop 
worrying and run spamass-milter as root".

Also, a related question: is it worth installing pyzor, or will 
spamassassin on its own be enough? I ask because pyzor doesn't seem to 
be in any of the main repositories.

Thanks in advance,
Hywel.