Add custom rules to spamassassin?

I would like to add some of my own rules to SA to tweak its message filtering, specifically, using regex. My understanding is that the way to do this is via the user_prefs file in my home dir, but DH actually runs SA on a separate server, so
this file would have no effect.
Does anybody know of a work-around?

I've been emailing support about this, and from what I understand the only way to customize Spamassassin beyond the options they offer in the webmail frontend is to have your own spamassassin installation in your home directory and "manually" do the filtering there using procmail or something similar.

This is pretty unfortunate, as the Dreamhost mail filter doesn't seem to be very effective. That said, the accounts here also seem to have much more flexibility with regard to installing/compiling our own tools than I have seen at other shared hosts. A trade-off I suppose...

Check out this dreamhost wiki post.
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/SpamAssassin

If you get that far, I suggest installing FuzzyOCR too.
http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/FuzzyOcrPlugin

I just did that in my ongoing attempt to fight back against the new fad of inline gif spam.

@#%@%@

See here what else you get!

Guess I'll have to do my own install, then. Thanks for the pointer to the DH wicki where it describes how to do that--I'd missed that!

And yes, I've noticed that gif spam too. I'll give the FuzzyOCR a shot as well!

Well, finally got around to installing my own SpamAssassin, using the helpful wikis provided by DH, but for some reason my installation (3.1.4) only seems to be working with my primary email account. I'm a little confused here, I admit, but it looks to me as though only the primary account is using the ~/Maildir.. directories, which is indeed what SA is working on, but where the heck do my other accounts' (and other domains' accounts') emails end up? Some other server somewhere?

I mean...what th'...?

Alas, I don't know any method other then to install it on every account, route everything to the account in question, or setup groups correctly and see if other accounts can access your primary spamassassin install.



See here what else you get!

I think that the catch is that mail-only accounts, the m123456 ones, don't have a shell account, or a method to manually process mail through a custom SpamAssassin installation.

The only way around this is to create an FTP account for each user whose mail you want to run through a custom SpamAssassin installation.

I'd be happy is DH just upgraded their copy of SpamAssassin so we get better filtering.

-Scott

I got a question about the custom install of Spamassassin.

I installed 3.1.5 finally, and it APPEARS to be working. I'm curious, though, about some configurations. I noticed that even though the Junk Mail is turned off in my web hosting control panel, i still see the spamassassin and junk mail stuff inside the squirrelmail web interface for the email address upon which the custom SA install exists.

Do the custom settings override those presented in Squirrel mail? Specifically, if I specify stuff in user_prefs, will it override the defaults in Squirrelmail?

Look at the header in SquirrelMail to see which version of SA is examining it, and it's probably the 3.1.5 you installed. I think you have to have filtering and junk mail settings switched off in squirrlemail, in which case your user_prefs/SA settings should have precedence.