The Life of a Sysadmin

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Upgrades^3
2005-11-02 21:05:21

Upgrading SpamAssassin at work; we're using 2.63, and they're up to, what, 3.1.0 now? The upgrade itself was relatively painless, but for complicated reasons it was integrated with Mimedefang, and I didn't like that. MDF is great, but:

  1. It takes out the SA score header. This can be corrected, but
  2. it turns the SA score into a number, rather than a series of asterisks, which makes it difficult to filter with a regex, or with Outlook. (I have SA set conservatively, but the header makes it easy to filter more aggressively if that's what you want.
  3. Finally, MDF puts the SA report into the message as an attachment. Admittedly, it's a plain-text attachment, but that doesn't console the Outlook users who are worried (and rightly so) about clicking on attachments.

Hm. Will have to figure out a way around that; maybe just run spamc/spamd like I currently do. I've also got word that, due to some old prototype equipment no longer being needed, I will have three new boxes to play with. Woohoo! I'm already planning the DRBD fileserver. Finally, I managed to get the new version of uClinux to compile and run on the NWR04B. Sweet...except that I didn't check out a particular tag, and I'm having to guess at the date when I did check out my tree, which makes it difficult to say exactly what I've got. Currently checking out with the date set to when I think I grabbed it, then may upgrade/downgrade to the latest tag (currently 2.4.31).

Comments On This Entry

Saint Aardvark
Submitted at 07:09:34 on 25 November 2005
Coolness...many thanks!
Royce
Submitted at 23:12:39 on 20 November 2005
IIRC, all of the MD features that you're describing are configurable so that they match the behavior that you prefer. I didn't like any of those things, either. :) I think that they are set in the MD-specific SA settings file sa-mimedefang.cf (or whatever it's called now). -royce
Saint Aardvark
Submitted at 06:43:07 on 21 November 2005
Thanks for the tip -- I suspect I was looking in the wrong config file. The as-an-attachment thing really bugs me, and I need to track that down.
Royce
Submitted at 11:16:55 on 23 November 2005
Here it is: $ grep -C4 report_header /usr/local/etc/mimedefang/sa-mimedefang.cf # By default, spamassassin will include its report in the body # of suspected spam. Enabling this causes the report to go in the # headers instead. Using 'use_terse_report' for this is recommended. # # report_header 1 report_header 1 # By default, SpamAssassin uses a fairly long report format. # Enabling this uses a shorter format which includes all the # information in the normal one, but without the superfluous