Comments on: SpamAssassin for Dreamhost

By: Chris B

Chris B — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I followed your extremely helpful instructions for setting up SpamAssassin on my Dreamhost account, but it does not appear to be working correctly. When I checked the procmail log, I saw these messages:

/home/cbraunsd/lib/SpamAssassin/spamassassin.raw: my: command not found
/home/cbraunsd/lib/SpamAssassin/spamassassin.raw: use: command not found
/home/cbraunsd/lib/SpamAssassin/spamassassin.raw: BEGIN: command not found
/home/cbraunsd/lib/SpamAssassin/spamassassin.raw: line 17: syntax error near unexpected token `File::Spec->splitpath($'
/home/cbraunsd/lib/SpamAssassin/spamassassin.raw: line 17: `  my @bin = File::Spec->splitpath($0);'
procmail: Program failure (2) of "/home/cbraunsd/lib/SpamAssassin/spamassassin.raw"
procmail: Rescue of unfiltered data succeeded

Any ideas on what might be causing this and what I can do to fix it? In addition, once it is working, what can I expect? I have been using Razor; does Spam Assassin work similarly by putting spam in a separate folder?

Thanks!

By: Chris B

Chris B — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, I reinstalled it and now it seems to be working (i.e., I see SpamAssassin info in the header and the log files don't reflect any errors). But I'm still confused about how SpamAssassin handles the spam - does it delete it, do I have to create a folder for it?

Thanks!

By: Michael Steinbaugh

Michael Steinbaugh — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

SpamAssassin moves it into a Spam folder like Razor, at least that’s the way I set it up in the instructions on the site. If you go into SquirrelMail, there is a link at the very top of the right column that says Folders. Click on that and under Unsubscribe/Subscribe there should be a folder on the right that says Spam. This folder will only be present if there has been a Spam message sent to you. The other way you can check is to log onto your web space via FTP, go to Maildir then .Spam then new. You can check your message log as well in the procmail folder and when you get a spam, it will indicate where the Spam has been moved. But no, it doesn’t delete the messages because that would be bad — I’ve gotten a couple of false positives from AOL users without real names entered in to the “To:” field in the e-mail.

By: Chris B

Chris B — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks for the input. It seems to be working now :)

By: Zack

Zack — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks for the instructions. Do you know how I can install SpamAssassin for a user who has a mailbox but not a shell account on my domain hosted by Dreamhost?

By: Russell Finn

Russell Finn — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I also followed these directions to install SpamAssassin 2.60. Things seemed to work for a while, but when I looked in my procmail log file I saw a whole bunch of error messages for each piece of mail that was sent to SpamAssassin -- mostly "Failed to run ... SpamAssassin test" messages with the same explanation:

... (perhaps you forgot to load "Mail::SpamAssassin::PerMsgStatus"?) at ~/lib/SpamAssassin/lib/Mail/SpamAssassin/PerMsgStatus.pm line 2219

This seemed odd, so I did a little investigation. I finally changed the invocation line from "spamassassin.raw" (which looks like it's supposed to be an input file for the configuration/installation process) to "spamassassin", and the errors went away. At the same time, the form of the notice inserted by SpamAssassin at the head of spam messages changed, from the familiar "This mail is probably spam" to one beginning:

Spam detection software, running on the system "hostname.dreamhost.com", has identified this incoming email as possible spam. ...

I found this latter text in the rule file 10misc.cf in my local installation. The original text could only be found in the system-wide installation, at /etc/spamassassin/10misc.cf. Apparently when spamassassin.raw failed to find certain files it fell back on a global version. (I don't know Perl so I couldn't pursue this.)

My question, then, is why do your directions suggest running spamassassin.raw? (And am I correct in changing it to plain spamassassin?)

By: Michael Steinbaugh

Michael Steinbaugh — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Zack: The user account must be a shell account to install SpamAssassin. However, you can use Razor with Dreamhost mailbox accounts.

Russell: It looks like there is some problem with your configuration path. The path in the spamassassin.raw output looks strange to me:

~/lib/SpamAssassin/lib/Mail/SpamAssassin/PerMsgStatus.pm

See how the /lib/SpamAssassin part is duplicated? Did you set up the program that way?

Also, if you are correct about invoking Dreamhost's global SpamAssassin install with spamassassin instead of spamassassin.raw. However, their version is very old and unsupported, since they now use Razor. spamassassin.raw is indeed the file you want to call up. However, there may have been some program tweaks with SpamAssassin 2.60. I'm not sure what they did because I'm still running 2.55. I'll try installing 2.60 and see how it goes. I'll see if I can generate the same error. It's possible that I need to modify some of Richard's files.

By: Nancy McGough

Nancy McGough — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I installed SpamAssassin 2.60 on my DH account by following the instructions in the SA INSTALL file and it seems to be working fine. I did not do anything with a ~/lib directory or symbolic linking and I'm wondering if that's necessary?

BTW, I just updated my IMAP Service Providers page and added a link to this article in the DreamHost section, which is here:

www.ii.com/internet/messaging/imap/isps/#DH

Thanks for your article and this discussion, Nancy

By: Nancy McGough

Nancy McGough — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

A couple more comments: I'm writing about my SpamAssassin and Procmail configurations here and here

Both of these are works in progress, but these are basically the configs that I'm currently using on my DH account.

By: Zack

Zack — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Mike: I just installed 2.60 and I am getting similar errors to Russell.