Re: Is there a way of updating spamassassin rules?

[Gavin Westwood <deb-volatile@solutium.co.uk>]

Stephen Gran wrote:

This one time, at band camp, Martin Zobel-Helas said:
  

On Mon Oct 30, 2006 at 23:21:06 +1100, Robert S wrote:
    

Thanks for the suggestions.  I had a bit of bother with
volatile-sloppy - spamc started timing out and a lot of spam got
through.  I ended up downgrading back to the sarge version.  It looks
like the latest version in sloppy needs to be compiled by hand.

Think I'll wait until Etch becomes stable - that has 3.1.4, which I
believe contains sa-update.
      

was there an error message? Also, did you had a look on [1]?

I would be interessted in more information, as i am one of the persons
behind debian-volatile.

Greetings
Martin

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-volatile/2005/12/msg00013.html
    

The most likely explanation is the increased hardware requirements with
newer versions of SA.  Frankly, it's just taking longer and longer to
scan messages at every upgrade.  I can well imagine that if the hardware
is several years old, it may just take too long, and trip an alarm.
  

I use Spamassassin 3.1.4 from Backports ( http://www.backports.org ) and I can confirm that I've had issues on slower hardware - if I get too many emails at once, spamd will fall over, giving errors like "spamc[3916]: connect(AF_INET) to spamd at 127.0.0.1 failed, retrying (#1 of 3): Connection refused".

There are other ways to improve Spamassassin's hit rate - I have some custom rules (search on "spamassassin custom rules" - without the quotes), and on my hosting server, I use channels (using sa-update - see http://daryl.dostech.ca/sa-update/sare/sare-sa-update-howto.txt ) to subscribe to a set of rules relating to stock spam (see http://www.rulesemporium.com/rules.htm ).

Gavin