[Sussex] Cautionary notes - amavis & spamassassin

[Iain Stevenson]

--On Wednesday, November 10, 2004 8:07 pm +0000 Alan F 
<alan at slug.greenmeads.co.uk> wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 10, 2004 at 02:01:22PM +0000, Iain Stevenson wrote:
>>
>> 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
>
> Did you sa-learn --sync? I'm pretty sure I remember reading that
> instruction in the release notes after I had the same problem...
>

Yes - it didn't make any difference. I also tried most of the database 
export "tricks" suggested in the Spamassassin wiki but they failed too. 
Somewhere along the line one of the tools probably mucked up the database. 
I could have gone to a backup but thought it easier to go MySQL and educate 
the Bayes system with fresh spam.


>> - Support for DCC and Pyzor is broken in SpamAssassin 3.0.1 - so do
>> without  them or expect trouble
>
> Indeed. Razor is still working (by far my highest scoring test),
> though. DCC is pretty slow anyway and adds a lot to scanning time, so
> I don't really miss it.
>

Thanks for that - Razor has been working OK for me so far too.  It looks as 
though it's stable.

>> - 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
>>
>
> I don't really use this... Virii gets consigned to oblivion (accurate
> enough for me to not care about quarantining it), and spam gets tagged
> and dealt with by procmail.
>
> The switch didn't go to bad for me, I waited until 3.0.1 instead of
> diving into using 3.0.0. The URI blacklists are very cool (blocking
> based on spamvertised URL's. I've noticed a marked difference in
> performance also. Oh! And SPF support is nice to see...
>

Something else for me to look into!

  Iain