So, I decided to stick my email address at the top of my blog. I’ve got some pretty good filters in Pine, and I haven’t had a problem with spam in years, I figured this was a good time to test things out.
It took about a month and a half for the spam to start rolling in. Even then, I tweaked my filters pretty well, and it still wasn’t bad.
But now I’m getting smarter spam. Stuff with HTML comments embedded between the words etc.
So I decided to fnially try spamassassin. The thing that’s been holding me back was the fact that it needs procmail, which last time I looked at it required a kidney before EACH use.
But the spam was finally getting annoying, so I grabbed spamassassin. I was very happy to notice that there are rpms for it. So I installed them, and went hunting docs. HA! Docs. The spamassassin site is woefully inadequate in that regard. I got a 404 on nearly every doc they purported to have. Fortunately for the rest of the world, they’re back. But hey, it was during my technology hell week so why should it have surprised me?
So I fired up GAIM to see if there were people smarter than me online. Sure enough, the poor sap of the moment was Adam. I say poor sap because I always feel bad bugging people about how to do stuff, but I was tired and frustrated. And Adam rocks, as you shall soon see.
Of course he told me to get procmail (I hadn’t because the spamassassin site made no mention of it). Happily for me there’s a Redhat9 rpm of that too.
So, I got those installed, ran spamd as root, and created my .procmailrc file, rendered here:
:0fw
* < 256000
| /usr/bin/spamc
:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
mail/trash
that just grabs mail that’s been marked as spam, and chucks it in ~/mail/trash How very handy.
So to sum up, in redhat9, grab these rpms:
perl-Mail-SpamAssassin-2.54-1.7.3.i386.rpm
spamassassin-2.54-1.7.3.i386.rpm
spamassassin-tools-2.54-1.7.3.i386.rpm
procmail-3.22-9.i386.rpm
Create a .procmailrc file simlar to the one I showed above, and start spamd. I’m assuming it would be similar on rh8 boxen as well.
Thanks Adam!
