postfix + spamassassin via milter

[Jeffrey Goldberg]

On Jul 15, 2007, at 10:39 AM, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:

> I running postfix from ports.  I would like to block as much spam  
> as possible during the SMTP session. [...]
>
> I see that postfix now does sendmail style milters.  Is that the  
> recommended way to go with this?  I see that there is a mail/ 
> spamass-milter port.  I anyone using that with postfix 2.4.3?

Here is what I have working so far.

Straight from ports


  p5-Mail-SpamAssassin-3.2.1
  spamass-milter-0.3.1_3
  postfix-2.4.3,1

To get postfix to use the milter, I added

  # milters for spam assassin
  milter_default_action = accept
  smtpd_milters = unix:/var/run/spamass-milter.sock

to main.cf

Note that the milter_default_action setting is so that if I mess up  
the milter, mail still goes through.  I may set this to tempfail once  
I am more confident.

Also to allow postfix to talk to the milter I added

  spamass_milter_socket_group="mail"
  spamass_milter_socket_mode="664"

to /etc/rc.conf (in addition to the _enable variables).

I will submit a PR with an addition to the documentation explaining  
how to do this  with postfix.

What I've been having the most difficulty with is spammassassin  
itself.  It runs correctly as the spamd user (note that this is *not*  
the spamd which is the BSD tarpit, but is a daemonized spamassassin.)  
but it still seems to think that is also running as user root and so  
tries to write things in

    /root/.spamassassin

Now if I change the ownership of that spamd then everything works  
fine, but I really don't want my bayes and whitelist database on the  
root filesystem.  I can (and have) manually set the paths for the  
bayes data and the autowhitelist data to a more  appropriate  
location, but the later path setting feature appears undocumented,  
and I still haven't figured out what path variable to set for the  
user preferences (so each time mail comes into the server,  
spamassassin, run as spamd, tries to read /root/.spamassassin/user_pref.

I'm sure that I could probably trace out the separate configuration  
variable to set that to the right location, but I'm wondering why  
spamassassin is looking in root's home directory at all instead of  
the spamd home directory.

-j




-- 
Jeffrey Goldberg                        http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/