On Fri, 14 Feb 2025, Lars Poulsen wrote:

As part of my nerdy home system, I have a Fedora Linux server, which is
my file server, my web server and my mail server. For almost 20 years,
my incoming mail was scrubbed by a spam filtering service operated by my friend in Switzerland, but he is now retiring, so I need to do this for myself now.

I figure the tool of choice is spamassassin, but where do I find a
reasonably simple how-to guide? I assume I cannot just
dnf install spamassassin
systemctl enable spamassassin.service
systemctl start spamassassin.service

But what more do I need to do?

If your friend is retiring, why not ask him? Maybe you can take over the service? =)

If not, here's a link, https://notes.sagredo.eu/en/qmail-notes-185/installing-and-configuring-spamassassin-37.html
, but I assume you already have a handful of tutorials that were not what
you were looking for.

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As part of my nerdy home system, I have a Fedora Linux server, which is
my file server, my web server and my mail server. For almost 20 years,
my incoming mail was scrubbed by a spam filtering service operated by my
friend in Switzerland, but he is now retiring, so I need to do this for
myself now.

I figure the tool of choice is spamassassin, but where do I find a
reasonably simple how-to guide? I assume I cannot just
dnf install spamassassin
systemctl enable spamassassin.service
systemctl start spamassassin.service

But what more do I need to do?

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Fri, 14 Feb 2025, Lars Poulsen wrote:

As part of my nerdy home system, I have a Fedora Linux server, which is
my file server, my web server and my mail server. For almost 20 years,
my incoming mail was scrubbed by a spam filtering service operated by my
friend in Switzerland, but he is now retiring, so I need to do this for
myself now.

I figure the tool of choice is spamassassin, but where do I find a
reasonably simple how-to guide? I assume I cannot just
dnf install spamassassin
systemctl enable spamassassin.service
systemctl start spamassassin.service

But what more do I need to do?

On 2025-02-14, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:

If your friend is retiring, why not ask him? Maybe you can take over the service? =)

I really do not want to start another marginal business at this point.
I would have been much more pleased if there was someone else, I could
just hand it to: Set my MX records to their "scrubber" and get the "good
mail" delivered to port 25 or 587 on my server. But if such exist, it is
not set up to work for my size of business. Rackspace can host a custom
domain on their mail server, from where I (or my users) can pick it up
with IMAP, but (a) migrating my archives out to their IMAP serverr would
be a pain (and they don't want to have hundreds of GB of my mail on
their server, so they charge for that) and (b) they would not let me run /mailman/ ...

If not, here's a link, https://notes.sagredo.eu/en/qmail-notes-185/installing-and-configuring-spamassassin-37.html
, but I assume you already have a handful of tutorials that were not what
you were looking for.

No, this assumes that I have already read a manual's worth of setup
detail. I am looking for no more than 5 pages that will get me to a
running system, where I can then upgrade the filters incrementally in
due time.

But two clicks away from that page, I got to this, which is much closer
to what I am looking for:
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/SPAMASSASSIN/StartUsing

As ever, the problem is not that there is no documentation, or even that
there is no documentation at the level I am looking for, but tht there
is so much documentation (much of it redundant) tht the stuff I want
drowns in the sea of additional stuff.

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On 2025-02-14, Dan Espen <dan1espen@gmail.com> wrote:

Lars Poulsen <lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com> writes:

As part of my nerdy home system, I have a Fedora Linux server, which is
my file server, my web server and my mail server. For almost 20 years,
my incoming mail was scrubbed by a spam filtering service operated by my
friend in Switzerland, but he is now retiring, so I need to do this for
myself now.

I figure the tool of choice is spamassassin, but where do I find a
reasonably simple how-to guide? I assume I cannot just
dnf install spamassassin
systemctl enable spamassassin.service
systemctl start spamassassin.service

But what more do I need to do?

dnf install spamassassin

works fine.

You may or may not need to start it as a service, that's up to you.
"spamd" just makes it run a little faster.

The man page should be sufficient to figure out the rest.

So these 3 commands are likely to work, without screwing anything up?

Does spamassassin take over the submission port without any editing of sendmail.cf? (Most descriptions of spamassassin assume that you are
running procmail. I figured out a sendmail.cf 30 years ago, and have not
had to page all of that in for at least 20 years.)

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On Fri, 14 Feb 2025 21:47:24 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen wrote:

I figure the tool of choice is spamassassin, but where do I find a
reasonably simple how-to guide?

Last I looked, it was a service that individual users had to configure
(e.g. via procmail) for filtering their own mail -- the normal setup did
not automatically filter everything coming in for all users.

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At Fri, 14 Feb 2025 22:45:46 -0000 (UTC) Lars Poulsen <lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com> wrote:

On 2025-02-14, Dan Espen <dan1espen@gmail.com> wrote:

Lars Poulsen <lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com> writes:

As part of my nerdy home system, I have a Fedora Linux server, which is
my file server, my web server and my mail server. For almost 20 years,
my incoming mail was scrubbed by a spam filtering service operated by my >> friend in Switzerland, but he is now retiring, so I need to do this for
myself now.

I figure the tool of choice is spamassassin, but where do I find a
reasonably simple how-to guide? I assume I cannot just
dnf install spamassassin
systemctl enable spamassassin.service
systemctl start spamassassin.service

But what more do I need to do?

dnf install spamassassin

works fine.

You may or may not need to start it as a service, that's up to you.
"spamd" just makes it run a little faster.

The man page should be sufficient to figure out the rest.

So these 3 commands are likely to work, without screwing anything up?

Does spamassassin take over the submission port without any editing of sendmail.cf? (Most descriptions of spamassassin assume that you are
running procmail. I figured out a sendmail.cf 30 years ago, and have not
had to page all of that in for at least 20 years.)

Does anyone still use sendmail? I know that RHEL switched from sendmail to Postfix with RHEL 6/CentOs 6. In any case sendmail AND Postfix both use procmail as the final delivery for "local" mail.

Spamassassin does NOT take over the submission port. If you want spamassassin to scrub spam at that level, you need to also install mimedefang as a Milter (Mail Filter). Mimedefang will then pre-process incoming mail, both checking any attachments for maleware and also passing mail messages to spamassassin to check the email against spam filters and possibly mark it as rejectable, in which case mimedefang can tell your MTA to reject the message.

OTOH, you can have your .procmailrc run spamassassin directly or use spamd (spamassassin's deamon) and file spam into a spam folder or bounce it or any other thing Procmail can do.





--
Robert Heller -- Cell: 413-658-7953 GV: 978-633-5364
Deepwoods Software -- Custom Software Services
http://www.deepsoft.com/ -- Linux Administration Services
heller@deepsoft.com -- Webhosting Services

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At Fri, 14 Feb 2025 23:41:14 -0000 (UTC) Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Fri, 14 Feb 2025 21:47:24 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen wrote:

I figure the tool of choice is spamassassin, but where do I find a reasonably simple how-to guide?

Last I looked, it was a service that individual users had to configure
(e.g. via procmail) for filtering their own mail -- the normal setup did
not automatically filter everything coming in for all users.

It is possible to set up mimedefang as a "milter" (with either sendmail or Postfix, maybe other MTAs) and mimedefang can use spamassassin as a spam checker and possibly reject spam at the "door".

I have been using spamassassin+mimedefang with both sendmail (CentOS 5) and Postfix (CentOS 6, CentOS7, and now Debian 12). Works quite well, sometimes works too well, esp. when legit companies (and sometimes government agencies) us really bad web progreammers or crufty hosting providers that send legit
that looks like spam. Arg...




--
Robert Heller -- Cell: 413-658-7953 GV: 978-633-5364
Deepwoods Software -- Custom Software Services
http://www.deepsoft.com/ -- Linux Administration Services
heller@deepsoft.com -- Webhosting Services

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On Fri, 14 Feb 2025 22:39:48 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen wrote:

As ever, the problem is not that there is no documentation, or even that there is no documentation at the level I am looking for, but tht there
is so much documentation (much of it redundant) tht the stuff I want
drowns in the sea of additional stuff.

It sounds like Postfix. O'Reilly managed to get a doorstop suitable book
out of that years ago and I doubt it's gotten any simpler.

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