Sendmail and spamassassin

[Scot L. Harris]

On Thu, 2004-07-15 at 17:05, Edwin Dicker wrote:
> Hi All,
> I have installed and configured sendmail ( nothing really complicated in the
> sendmail.mc file )
> I also have installed spamassassin RPM (spamassassin-2.63-8)
> I have noticed that spamd is running on my system but When I receive mail on
> my clients there is nothing in the headers of the mail which indicates that
> spamd hads processed it. What do I have to tell sendmail to let spamd
> process the incoming mail ?
> 
> Thanks in advance
> Edwin

If you are using sendmail as the MTA you can use procmail to call
spamassassin (actually you would call spamc).  You can then use procmail
to drop messages marked as spam into a special user account for review
or go ahead and deliver the messages with additional headers to the
users mailbox.  

You can also use one of several milter solutions that are available
which call spamassassin from sendmail.

I have used the procmail solution at work and it has been very good.

You will need to sort out a process of capturing spam and teaching the
bayesian database using sa-learn.  Bayes does an excellent job of
keeping up with the tricks spammers use.  It will also learn what you
personally believe is spam and ham and score accordingly.

You may also want to check out the additional rule sets provide by SARE
at http://www.rulesemporium.com.  They have additional rule sets that
can improve the accuracy of spamassassin.

And if you want to really do away with spam I recommend implementing
greylisting on your email server.  We used to get between 3000 and 6000
spam messages a day which spamassassin handled.  After implementing
greylisting we are getting between 3 and 10 spam messages a day which
are caught by spamassassin.  There are several greylisting packages
available.  I used the milter-greylist package at
http://hcpnet.free.fr/milter-greylist.  Very neat trick and highly
effective.

-- 
Scot L. Harris
webid at cfl.rr.com

Faith goes out through the window when beauty comes in at the door.