Spamassassin RBL's

[Olivier Nicole]

> How can I enable spamassasssin RBL's. I'm running FreeBSD 6.1, postfix,
> amavisd-new, and spamassassin with razor. I'm getting many spams that
> shouldn't be getting thru with RBL's. I havent been able to find anything
> useful on Google that can explain how to get RBL working with spamassassin.
> Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. 
 
RDL test are enabled in SA if you configure it in the local.cf
configuration. My config file is in /etc/mail/spamassassin.

I can find a lines saying:

skip_rbl_checks 0
rbl_timeout 30
dns_available yes

that means that I use RBL, and that I wait up to 30 seconds to get an
answer. I don't remember about the 3rd line, but it could be related.

Reason that your RBL rules are never triggered could be that the time
out is too low or that you have disabled RBL checks. Or that when you
received the spam, the sender was not yet listed. But was listed lated
when you did the dnsstuff.com check.

If I am not confused, the list of RBL configured in SA by default is
quite short, you may find it usefull to add more RBL to SA. But you
are faced with the risk of adding lists that are poorly managed and
have a lot of false positive.

Like mentionned bellow:

> Or you can out and out block servers in the RBL from your MTA. You
> probably want to be carefull with the latter technique since is
> transfers onus of the work of delivering the mail into the wrong
> hands.

If you do RBL at the MTA level, you better be sure that the RBL you
use are not polluted with false positives.

I'd try to run the ugly spam through SA by hand (spamassassin -t
<filename>) and see what the output is. You'll see if the RBL are
triggered or not.

If you are new to SA, I woudl warn you against modifying the scores
for RBL, unless you no what you are doing. SA scoring is a difficulte
and delicate task and modifying the scores may result in unwanted
situation.

Best regards,

Olivier