psa-spamassassin vs. spamassassin

[Spazholio@]

I've installed ART's spamassassin, and so far, it seemed to be working ok. In my /etc/init.d/ directory, I have both "psa-spamassassin" and "spamassassin".My problem is threefold:

- My customers are telling me that they're having trouble sending email at the same time everyday, and I'm not sure why.
- I don't know if I should keep both of the SA scripts in the /etc/init.d dir, or nuke one of them
- Every once in a while (every day or so), I get a rash of spam, and when I check the headers, there are no SA headers in there, so something's dying.

Whenever #3 happens, I just bounce both of the SA scripts, but that's not a sustainable solution. Can anyone point me in the right direction? I'm running PSA 8.3.0 on FC4.

Thanks!

 

[Geoff Riley]

For as starter you really don't want to be attempting to run both at the same time; there's no telling which one is actually getting to scan the mail --- or even if they're both ending up scanning!

You need to remove the psa-spamassassin module:
yum remove psa-spamassassin
..and possibly reinstall ART's spamassassin to make sure that nothing got deleted that's needed.

The drop out might be down to the corewars going on between the two versions.

 

[Spazholio@]

Thanks for that. I wasn't sure if I could/should remove the psa-spamassassin. I'm assuming that ART's SA is a better thing to have than the stock psa-spamassassin?

EDIT: if I remove the psa-spamassassin, does it affect the Plesk built-in SA training tools?

 

[Geoff Riley]

Yes to both questions: ARTs version is much better; but yes it also removed the training facility from within Plesk.

If you were still using the training within Plesk, then the chances are that you were training against the wrong database anyway. Since ARTs version does not use the training data held in the mailslots, but rather in /var/spool/qscan .

 

[Spazholio@]

Hmmm...that's unfortunate. Call me greedy, but I'd like to have the best of both worlds. If I remove the psa-spamassassin, how does one train the system? Forgive my ignorance here.

 

[Geoff Riley]

I've not found a web interface to do the learning with yet; I had a brief glance at ARTs squirrelmail, but couldn't see where the SA was interfacing.

From the shell command line you can just use
# sa-learn --spam {filename(s)}
to train for spam and
# sa-learn --ham {filename(s)}
to train for non-spam.

I've taken to giving people extra pair of email folders: INBOX.learn.SPAM and INBOX.learn.NOTSPAM with the instruction to move or copy any wrongly classified messages into the appropriate folder. Currently, because it's only just happened since weekend, I'm manually checking through and doing the teaching by hand; but I'm lucky in only having three domains using email at the moment on this server with a total of eighteen mail users so I can afford the luxury. However, I intend to put a cron script to run through, learn and delete the messages. If I had a lot of mail operating domains I would be more motivated to writing the script quicker.

I hope that helps.