In the search for a spam filter, my bandaged finger just went wabbling back to the fire, and I have to report that having spent an inordinate amount of time reading random documents on the net - most of which don't have dates or any other easy way to tell whether they reflect the current state of things or not - to find out what and how to install to get spam rejected at SMTP time, the actual process of installing spamassassin with sa-exim is pretty simple.
- Make sure you're using the "split config" option for exim4, and exim4-daemon-heavy
- Follow the instructions in /usr/share/doc/sa-exim/README.Debian
- Comment out the line in /etc/exim4/sa-exim.conf which says SAEximRunCond: 0
The only downside is that initial testing says it's utterly utterly useless. On a random sample of four spam emails (three of which spambayes said were spam and the other it said was 80% likely to be spam) spamassassin utterly failed to assign any of them a score exceeding 4.2
And for this level of service it wants to eat 18 of the 80MB RAM in this virtual machine? Get real. I need that space for, uh, the Ruby instance running this blog.
It may be, of course, that there is a configuration option for "actually do something useful" which I have not yet found, and which is turned off in the default configuration to satisfy the needs of those users who just install this crap because they like the intellectual challenge. It wouldn't surprise me.
Debian, less of an operating system, more of a self-assembly operating system construction kit.
