Book Image

SpamAssassin: A practical guide to integration and configuration

Book Image

SpamAssassin: A practical guide to integration and configuration

Overview of this book

As a busy administrator, you know Spam is a major distraction in todays network. The effects range from inappropriate content arriving in the mailboxes up to contact email addresses placed on a website being deluged with unsolicited mail, causing valid enquiries and sales leads to be lost and wasting employee time. The perception of the problem of spam is as big as the reality. In response to the growing problem of spam, a number of free and commercial applications and services have been developed to help network administrators and email users combat spam. Its up to you to choose and then get the most out of an antispam solution. Free to use, flexible, and effective, SpamAssassin has become the most popular open source antispam application. Its unique combination of power and flexibility make it the right choice. This book will now help you set up and optimize SpamAssassin for your network.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
SpamAssassin
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Introduction
Glossary

SpamAssassin as a Daemon


SpamAssassin is implemented as the /usr/bin/spamassasin script, which is a Perl script. There is some performance overhead involved in running a Perl script for each email. For sites with low volumes of email, this may not be an issue, but performance is a high priority for high volume sites. In these cases, the SpamAssassin daemon can be used to improve performance.

When SpamAssassin is used as a daemon, /usr/bin/spamd is run at system startup, and /usr/bin/spamc is used as a client. When used in Procmail recipes, /usr/bin/spamc and /usr/bin/spamassassin are often interchangeable, although they support different flags.

Note

For SpamAssassin to be used as a daemon, spamd must be started at system boot time.

The spamc and spamd programs are installed with SpamAssassin. The SpamAssassin distribution directory includes sample initialization scripts for starting the daemon. They are located in the spamd directory of the SpamAssassin build directory.

The spamd daemon supports...