Re: Spamassassin and procmail

[Kevin Buhr <buhr@telus.net>]

Antony Gelberg <antony@antgel.co.uk> writes:
> 
> I currently use fetchmail and procmail to get and sort my mail.  I'd
> like to use spamassassin as well, however when I add
>
> :0fw: spamassassin.lock
> | /usr/bin/spamassassin
>
> to my .procmailrc, it works ok, but then the mail gets delivered to
> /var/mail/<username>, rather than following the rest of my procmail
> recipes.

Rich's answer is right.  You need the "-P" option for the stable
version of SpamAssassin, and you don't need a lock, so the complete
rule should read:

        :0fw
        | /usr/bin/spamassassin -P

As an extra bit of advice, you might want to consider upgrading to the
version in "unstable" instead (which, by the way, doesn't need the
"-P" option).  A while back, I decided to give SpamAssassin a try to
see if it did a better job than the homespun rules that I'd
accumulated over the last few years.  I installed the 2.20-1woody
version from stable, and I was very disappointed.  It missed almost
everything.  For me, it was essentially useless.

Before tossing SpamAssassin entirely in the bit bucket, I decided to
give it a second chance by installing 2.55-3 from unstable.  It was
like night and day.  The newer version does a much, much better job.

The 2.55-3 source package builds fine on a vanilla Woody machine.  (In
fact, the unstable "spamassassin" binary package would install fine on
a vanilla Woody system, too, except it has an apparently unnecessary
dependency on "spamc" which depends on the unstable C library.)

-- 
Kevin <buhr@telus.net>