[Gllug] spamassassin

Nix nix at esperi.demon.co.uk
Mon Sep 30 19:15:36 UTC 2002


On Sun, 29 Sep 2002, Stig Brautaset moaned:
> I'm currently calling spamassassin from my .procmailrc, but I know it
> can be integrated with MTAs as well. Would that be beneficial? (I'm
> currently running exim).

Benefit: rejection at the SMTP level --- but it doesn't save any
         bandwidth, as SA scans the body and thus must receive it first.

         Might be able to get away with scanning only once for many
         recipients (but e.g. the sendmail milter architecture doesn't
         allow this, IIRC).

Disadvantages: Much less user control than when driven via procmail: some
               MTA-driven schemes don't even allow users to specify their
               own desired-languages and/or maintain their own whitelists.

If you're getting any more than a *tiny* mail volume I strongly
recommend running spamd and calling spamc from your .procmailrc; it
speeds up mail reception *drastically*. (~70--90% of spamasssassin's CPU
load is regex parsing and initialization delay; spamd amortizes that
across many runs). The only downside of spamd is that changes to system
SA configurations require a spamd restart, and that it eats 15Mb or so
of memory (but it'll spend most of its time swapped out, so that's no
problem).


I'd install SA 2.42 as well, it should have quite considerably better
scores than 2.41. It'll be out soon (scheduled for today but I see no
word on the mailing list and CVS is still untagged, so I guess it's
delayed).

-- 
`Let's have a round of applause for those daring young men
 and their flying spellcheckers.' --- Meg Worley

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