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(NOTE: this is part of the “An Anti-Spam gateway” series)

Go to the amavisd-new site and download the latest version (2.3.3 at the time of writing). Uncompress it somewhere, then copy amavisd to /usr/local/sbin (for instance), and amavisd.conf to /etc.

Edit the /etc/amavisd.conf file. Add the following lines to the end:

$daemon_user = ‘amavis’;
$daemon_group = ‘amavis’;
$mydomain = ‘YOURDOMAIN’; # replace with your own domain, of course
$virus_quarantine_method = ”;
$spam_quarantine_method = ”;
$banned_files_quarantine_method = ”;
$bad_header_quarantine_method = ”;
$sa_tag_level_deflt = -202.0;
$sa_tag2_level_deflt = 8.31;
$sa_kill_level_deflt = 50;
$sa_dsn_cutoff_level = 50;
$mailfrom_notify_admin = “YOUR EMAIL”; # add \ before the @, as in cats\@allyourbase.com
$mailfrom_notify_recip = “YOUR EMAIL”; # add \ before the @, as in cats\@allyourbase.com
$mailfrom_notify_spamadmin = “YOUR EMAIL”;# add \ before the @, as in cats\@allyourbase.com
$final_virus_destiny = D_DISCARD;
$final_banned_destiny = D_DISCARD;
$final_spam_destiny = D_DISCARD;
$final_bad_header_destiny = D_PASS; # many badly configured servers out there
$warnvirusrecip = 1;
$warnbannedrecip = 1;

(a few lines may have wrapped around in the above. They all start with “$“)

Create the following directories, making sure they belong to user and group amavis:

/var/amavis/tmp
/var/amavis/var,
/var/amavis/db

Run amavisd, and check if it’s listening in port 10024. If not, there should be some error message telling you what the problem (in /etc/amavisd.conf) is.

We’re almost done, now. Next: configuring Postfix to work with amavisd-new.

(NOTE: this is part of the “An Anti-Spam gateway” series)

Thought I’d forgotten about this one, didn’t you?

Ready to make SpamAssassin actually use MySQL for the bayes database?

Start by creating the database itself:

mysql
CREATE DATABASE bayes;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES on bayes.* TO bayes@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES on bayes.* TO bayes@10.0.0.1 IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
EXIT

changing password to something else, of course

Next, I know you’ve already installed SpamAssassin using CPAN, but go to www.spamassassin.org and download it manually; you’ll be needing a file from the distribution, and while it should still be in /root/.CPAN, it’s simpler this way. Uncompress the .tar.gz and go to the sql/ directory. Then type:

mysql -u bayes -p < bayes_mysql.sql

It’ll ask for a password, which is the one you used when creating the database.

Now, edit the file /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf. Add the following lines:

bayes_store_module Mail::SpamAssassin::BayesStore::MySQL
bayes_sql_dsn DBI:mysql:bayes:localhost
bayes_sql_username bayes
bayes_sql_password password

(again, replace password with the proper one.)

SpamAssassin is now configured to store bayes data on MySQL. Wasn’t too hard, was it?

(NOTE: this is part of the “An Anti-Spam gateway” series)

Time for MySQL. We’ll be using it just for storing the bayes tokens, not for per-user configuration (because, in this case, there is none) or anything else.

Note: if you already have a working MySQL on the server, being used for something else (this isn’t Windows, you can use the same machine for several different things :)), just skip to the next part.

So, go to http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/, choose the General Availability Release (it’s the top one - at this moment, it’s version 5.0), then scroll down a lot until you find the Source Downloads. Get the .tar.gz file. Uncompress it, enter the directory, and then…

export CFLAGS="-O2"
export CXXFLAGS="-O2 -fno-exceptions -fno-rtti"
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --localstatedir=/var/mysql --sysconfdir=/etc --without-innodb

(note: your browser may have split the “./configure” line in two. It starts with “./configure”, and ends with “–without-innodb”.)

then do the usual

make
make install

If everything went well,

mysql_install_db

and start the server with:

mysqld_safe --user=mysql &

Then assign a password to the MySQL root account (which is not the OS’s root account!):

mysqladmin -u root password "newpwd"
mysqladmin -u root -h host_name password "newpwd"

Replace “host_name” with the correct one, and “newpwd” with something else, of course.

Now, for efficiency, you should have an /etc/my.cnf file with several options set manually. The MySQL sources include some examples in the support-files directory: my-small.cnf, my-medium.cnf, etc.. Copy one to /etc/my.cnf, edit it, then restart the server. Nope, I won’t give detailed instructions for that here… read the MySQL docs at http://www.mysql.com.

Next: how to create the bayes database, and how to configure SpamAssassin to use it.