SpamAssassin how?

Having found Razor has collapsed over the past month or so in Spam filtering (lots of Viagra ads, nothing going to the Spam folder and training doing nothing) I thought I would try SpamAssassin to try and keep the worst from my young daughters. I installed in the root directory following the Webspiffy instructions and all went as described except SpamAssassin doesn't seem to be working judging by the headers. Read some of whats on the Forum and it seems there is a lot more to it that whats in the instructions (shell folders and stuff). My knowledge in this area is zero beyond following (with some trepidation) the instructions and feeling relieved when they seemed to work as described. So the question is, is there any more detailed set of instructions or someone who can help me out in words of one syllable?

Thanks

You do realize that you have to install it for each user, right? And that it won't work for "mail-only" (mxxxxxxxxx) users? The install will only work for the username you're installing SpamAssassin under. This is discussed in some other threads here.

There are a few other howtos (google for SpamAssassin and Dreamhost)... however all assume a certain amount of knowledge, though.

Depending on your childrens' ages, it may be best not to provide them with direct email access, or to only allow email from known addresses (aside from maintaining this server-side, some mail clients have an option to only display mail from known addresses)...

You may also want to look into various client-side filtering options.

I am pleased to announce that we are finally actively working on some (long overdue) server-side spam and virus filtering options, which will hopefully be effective for the majority of users; there should hopefully be some beta tests soon.

In reply to:
I am pleased to announce that we are finally actively working on some (long overdue) server-side spam and virus filtering options, which will hopefully be effective for the majority of users; there should hopefully be some beta tests soon.

This just made my weekend :-D

<Very happy DH customer

willscorner.net

Thanks. Useful info like that is unfortunately missing from all the guides I've read. I've set up a new user account to test it all out before I go through the process of switching all the mail accounts over to users. Is it worth carrying on or is it worth wating for your stuff you are working on?

Interestingly the new user account had spam in it within 5 minutes of it being set up but that's another matter

Will be back if I get stuck

Tony

In reply to:
Useful info like that is unfortunately missing from all the guides I've read.

Yeah - I can understand why some people are confused by this - I doubt it occurred to the people who wrote the documents in question that people would think it would work that way - you could write them and ask them to explain that in more detail.

Note that it *is* basically possible to do a single SA install for multiple users on an account, and this is somewhat easier to keep up-to-date -- however it's more difficult to setup initially.

Note also that once we get some sort of new filtering system in place, we will probably place some restrictions on use of SpamAssassin. As it becomes more popular, the resource usage problems are starting to get worse (which is one reason we haven't officially encouraged people to use it that much).

In reply to:
Interestingly the new user account had spam in it within 5 minutes of it being set up

To an address at one of your domains?

My ISP is moving from Postini to [spasm] and I've been trying it out. I was shocked...SHOCKED...at the drop in spam messages coming through virtual domains I have hosted at that ISP. Using the "medium" setting I've dropped about 200-250 spam messages per day with not a single false-positive yet.
I was planning to move a couple of my older domains hosted there (for free) because I like the flexibility of the DH panel etc. but I'm having second thoughts...these old domains attract a lot of spam and I'm suddenly thinking I don't want to give up this excellent server-side filtering, even though DH hosting features otherwise smokes even free hosting. If there is a way for DH to use spasm that would be v-e-r-y cool. I'm just a clueless user so there's probably some reason it's no good for DH, but I'd recommend somebody smart check it out. It's GPL.