[Mailman-Users] Help with SpamAssassin

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

J.R. Constance writes:

 > I have been working through the instrucitons available at http:// 
 > www.jamesh.id.au/articles/mailman-spamassassin/

I believe these instructions are pretty old, and SpamAssassin has
evolved significantly since then.

 > I get the following:
 > 
 > warn: Unknown option: a
 > Usage:
 >      spamd [options]

Confirmation of the "golden oldie" status of the instructions.  You
really should read the man page and other documentation for spamd,
spamassassin, and spamc.

 > i moved on to the next step (not using RPM's) which was:
 > 
 > chkconfig --level 345 spamassassin on

AFAIK chkconfig is Red Hat/RPM-specific.  If you didn't install
SpamAssassin from RPMs, this isn't going to work.

 > error reading information on service spamassassin: No such file or  
 > directory

Consistent with the above guess.

Note that it's not a certainty that anybody here is a SpamAssassin
expert with experience on your platform.  While eventually you need to
work with Mailman, at this stage I strongly recommend you ask about
installing and testing SpamAssassin on platform and SpamAssassin
channels, too.

 > Anybody have any ideas why this isn't working, or recommendations for  
 > what else I can check?

First, a caution.  If you're serious about "locked-down" mode (eg,
having your lists spammed or your server turned into a spammer zombie
could cost your job), maybe you should hire an expert.  It's not
something that can be achieved by following recipes you find on the
web.  If you're willing to accept something more-or-less secure and
you're on a Red Hat system, then I would recommend installing both
SpamAssassin and Mailman from RPMs, and going on from there.

If/when you run into trouble, specify the vendor and version of your
OS, the versions of the Mailman and SpamAssassin packages, and
reproduce both commands and the informational and error messages that
they produce verbatim.

If you're not on Red Hat, we'll need the system details as above.