[Sussex] Cautionary notes - amavis & spamassassin

[Iain Stevenson]

Having just been 'educated' by linux again, I thought I'd post a few notes 
of caution on leading edge spam and virus scanning ...

I upgraded to SpamAssassin 3.0.1 and found my email system was broken. 
Specific issues are:

- SpamAssassin can't distinguish between versions of Berkeley DB - so if, 
like me you've a system with more than one version installed you're likely 
to stuff the Bayes databases
- Support for DCC and Pyzor is broken in SpamAssassin 3.0.1 - so do without 
them or expect trouble
- Amavisd-new 2 has some subtle differences in the way email forwarding and 
quarantining are handled - it's not just a simple cut and paste job to 
upgrade from earlier versions

The problems with SpamAssassin 3.0.1 are mentioned in the relevant mailing 
lists but no solutions are presented.

One answer to the Berkeley DB issue is to use MySQL to store the Bayes (and 
auto whitelist) databases.  That works well - so far.  The only issue is to 
make sure you add the user name under which you train SpamAssassin as 
bayes_sql_override_username - if you're doing a site-wide installation. 
Otherwise SpamAssassin will say there are no spam tokens in the database.

Oh well, off to a darkened room for a lie down ...

  Iain