Basic procmail configuration with spamassassin filtering

Major Hayden — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:00:48 +0000

I've used this extremely basic procmail configuration a million times, and it's a great start for any server configuration. It passes e-mails through spamassassin (if they're smaller than 256KB) and then filters any e-mail marked as spam to /dev/null:

LOGFILE=/var/log/procmail.log DROPPRIVS=yes


:0fw

| /usr/bin/spamc

:0 * ^X-Spam-Status: Yes /dev/null

Of course, you can make this much more complicated with some additional customization.

Basic procmail configuration with spamassassin filtering is a post from: Major Hayden's Racker Hacker blog.

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High iowait on RHEL 4 with Plesk and SpamAssassin

Major Hayden — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 18:38:58 +0000

One of my biggest complaints on RHEL 4 is the large resource usage by the version of SpamAssassin that is installed. When it runs, it uses a ton of CPU time and causes a lot of disk I/O as well. When running top, you may see multiple spamd processes. For a high-volume e-mail server (like the one I administer), this is simply unacceptable.

I decided to do something about it, and here are the steps:

First, you will need two RPMs:
Latest SpamAssassin RPM from Dag
The psa-spamassassin RPM from SWSoft/Parallels.

Once you have them both on the server, install the new SpamAssassin package from Dag:

# rpm -Uvh spamassassin-(version).el4.rf.(arch).rpm

At this point, Plesk's spamassassin scripts will be non-functional, but the next step will fix it:

# rpm -Uvh --force psa-spamassassin-(version).(arch).rpm

NOTE: DO NOT REMOVE the psa-spamassassin RPM. This will begin stripping your system of all SpamAssassin configurations and it cannot be reversed!

Plesk's SpamAssassin scripts have been restored at this point in the process. Now, we need to do the part that really makes SpamAssassin work efficiently:

# sa-update; sa-compile;

This will update the SpamAssassin rules, and it will compile the rules with re2c (you may also need to get this RPM from Dag). This compilation means less disk access, and less CPU time being used to process e-mails.

To activate the compiled rules within SpamAssassin, uncomment the plugin line in /etc/mail/spamassassin/v320.pre:

# Rule2XSBody - speedup by compilation of ruleset to native code # loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::Rule2XSBody

Please bear in mind that this process is done at your own risk. This may cause issues getting support from SWSoft or your hosting company. This has been tested on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 64-bit with Plesk 8.1.1, 8.2.0, and 8.2.1 with SpamAssassin 3.2.3 and 3.2.4.

High iowait on RHEL 4 with Plesk and SpamAssassin is a post from: Major Hayden's Racker Hacker blog.

Thanks for following the blog via the RSS feed. Please don't copy my posts or quote portions of them without attribution.

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Basic procmail configuration with spamassassin filtering

High iowait on RHEL 4 with Plesk and SpamAssassin