Spamassassin via procmail: .procmailrc moves spam messages, but /etc/procmailrc doesn’t

procmailspamassassin

I am trying this example to set up spamassassin via procmail globally. It successfully adds the X-Spam headers, but it does not move messages to the spam mboxes.

However, using this example locally, at each user's .procmailrc file, does work (commenting out, as instructed, DROPPRIVS=yes).

I guess this is related to file permissions, but I'm lost about how to fix it. Any thoughts?

Thank you in advance!

EDIT: Following tripleee's suggestion, I enabled logging with the following results:

# cat /var/log/proclog 
procmail: Assigning "DROPPRIVS=yes"
procmail: Assuming identity of the recipient, VERBOSE=off
procmail: Lock failure on "spamassassin.lock"
procmail: Lock failure on "almost-certainly-spam.lock"
procmail: Error while writing to "almost-certainly-spam"
procmail: Lock failure on "probably-spam.lock"
procmail: Error while writing to "probably-spam"
From root@example.net  Sun Feb 12 06:12:44 2012
  Folder: /var/mail/user

Best Answer

For the record I'm answering this, but the credit goes to tripleee for his suggestion. Adding the following line (or similar) in /etc/procmailrc fixes the issue:

MAILDIR=$HOME

Related Solutions

Spamassassin: How to delete all spam messages on the server

From the SpamAssassin FAQ on this issue:

SpamAssassin itself will not delete any emails. It's only a filter which reads email in, and passes that same email out, modified in some way. If you want to delete emails, or redirect emails, you need to do it in whatever program calls SpamAssassin.

In general it's a bad idea to delete mail marked as spam because your clients won't be able to deal with false positives. Since the deletion would happen after your server has accepted the message, the sender would also not know about it being deleted, resulting in silent mail loss.

Instead you should configure your mail system to put marked mail in a "quarantine" folder, to allow your users to go through it if necessary.

EDIT:

BTW, you really need to rearrange your notification mail. The reason SpamAssassin marks it is because it really does look like spam:

TVD_SPACE_RATIO - lots of whitespace, indicative of spam or non-human message generator
MIME_HTML_ONLY - indicator of bulk-email software
HTML_MIME_NO_HTML_TAG - indicator of bulk-email software
HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_08 - images with little text. Major indicator of spam.

Configuring your own SpamAssassin installation to let them though would not do much good, since your users' mail filters are bound to block this as well.

EDIT 2:

This link seems to contain enough information to setup a quarantine folder for spam email using Amavis.

SpamAssassin doesn’t appear to be ‘learning’ from forwarded examples of spam

Spamassassin uses a number of rules to decide if an email is blocked and creates a score of each email. This is normally included in the header of each email, so you can see which rules have trigged.

The Spamassassin training improves the Bayesian spam testing, so if the training is working you should see the following appear

X-Spam-Status: Yes/No, score=X.X required=5.0 tests=BAYES_99...... autolearn=no

The BAYES_99 score means the email has spam probability is 99 to 100%, however you can get BAYES_00 to BAYES_99.

If you can't see the above line in any emails, then Spamassassin is not working.

On my Virtualmin setup i've changed to having a spam folder that i move emails to and then there is a daily job that runs the Spamassassing training and after 4 weeks deletes the email.

I currently setup the script for each user with the following:

/usr/bin/sa-learn -u <username> --spam /home/domain/homes/<user>/Maildir/.<folder name>/cur/  
/usr/bin/find /home/domain/homes/<user>/Maildir/.<folder name>/cur/ -mtime+28 -exec rm {} \;

Best Answer

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Spamassassin: How to delete all spam messages on the server

SpamAssassin doesn’t appear to be ‘learning’ from forwarded examples of spam

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