Mailing List Archive

SA and Bayes
Hello spam-haters,

A small thing eludes me here... I have trained SA and I am now using
bayes, but once in a while, I see errors like:

Feb 18 19:04:46 ns2 spamd[58747]: cannot write to /etc/mail/spamassassin/bayes_journal, Bayes db update ignored
Feb 18 19:04:46 ns2 spamd[58747]: cannot write to /etc/mail/spamassassin/bayes_journal, Bayes db update ignored

I am starting spamd with "-d -a -c"

The files in /etc/mail/spamassassin/ are owned by nobody, but somehow I
find that the file bayes_journal has changed ownership to another user
other than nobody!
I believe this is because I do spam filtering at two levels, and which
is what could be my undoing. All messages are passed through SA at smtp
time via exiscan and anything scoring above 9 is rejected at that time.
At a different level, I have some users who would rather be notified if
they received any spam, so I call procmail from a special-purpose router
to look at the messages destined for these people and if they are spam
(score above the threshold in local.cf) then the mail is saved in a
quarantine directory and some scripts run to inform the user, and even
give them the ability to retrieve the e-mail if it happens to be a FP.
I am thinking that at some point in the scanning process for these
users, SA does SUID to the user and thus changes the ownership of
bayes_journal to that user. What I fail to discover is why the ownership
then remains unchanged further.

I'm sure running SA with -u root is not an option as it doesn't seem to
work and neither do I like running anything as root!

Any ideas why this happens? I have pulled enough hair from my head about
this. I am running on FreeBSD.

How do others who use bayes in a fairly large (isp) environment start
spamd (with what arguemnts) and what is their config like?

I'd really love to use the bayesian classifier...


TIA

cheers
- wash
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-Wash

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