Mailing List Archive

At 16:48 10/02/2004, George Kasica wrote:
>In the last 3-4 days I'd suddenly seen a massive drop in speed in SA
>2.11 here I occasionally see the an error series like this:

Err,

SA 2.11 ?

Sounds extremely ancient to me, considering 2.63 is the latest. Any version
earlier than 2.6 is going to have "issues" out of the box, such as trying
to query RBL lists that no longer exist, and if you really are running 2.11
this is likely why...

Regards,
Simon

>On Tue, 10 Feb 2004 16:54:00 +1300, you wrote:

>At 16:48 10/02/2004, George Kasica wrote:
>>In the last 3-4 days I'd suddenly seen a massive drop in speed in SA
>>2.11 here I occasionally see the an error series like this:
>
>Err,
>
>SA 2.11 ?
>
>Sounds extremely ancient to me, considering 2.63 is the latest. Any version
>earlier than 2.6 is going to have "issues" out of the box, such as trying
>to query RBL lists that no longer exist, and if you really are running 2.11
>this is likely why...
>
>Regards,
>Simon
OK, I'll admit its old, let me ask the next question, how hard is the
upgrade to the current 2.63 version. I'm not a perl wizard, but am a
decent Unix admin. Is there a way to convert the existing rule sets?
I've heard 2.6.3 needs to get "trained" where as 2.11 did not, how
hard is this process as we don't save spam here but just mark it and
thats all.

Thanks,.

George
George, MR. Tibbs, Nazerene, Ginger/The Beast Kasica(8/1/88-3/19/01, 1/17/02-)
Jackson, WI USA
georgek@netwrx1.com
http://www.netwrx1.com/georgek
ICQ #12862186

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|,4- ) )-,_..;\ ( `'_'
'---''(_/--' `-'\_)

Hi,

On Tue, 10 Feb 2004 06:19:22 -0600 George Kasica <georgek@netwrx1.com> wrote:

> >On Tue, 10 Feb 2004 16:54:00 +1300, you wrote:
>
> >At 16:48 10/02/2004, George Kasica wrote:
> >>In the last 3-4 days I'd suddenly seen a massive drop in speed in SA
> >>2.11 here I occasionally see the an error series like this:
> >
> >Sounds extremely ancient to me, considering 2.63 is the latest. Any version
> >earlier than 2.6 is going to have "issues" out of the box, such as trying
> >to query RBL lists that no longer exist, and if you really are running 2.11
> >this is likely why...
>
> OK, I'll admit its old, let me ask the next question, how hard is the
> upgrade to the current 2.63 version. I'm not a perl wizard, but am a
> decent Unix admin. Is there a way to convert the existing rule sets?

Your existing custom rules or the stock rules that come with SA? If you
put your custom rules under /etc/mail/spamassassin, they will be
preserved between upgrades. The stock rules that ship with SA will be
upgraded since many rules have been added and dropped as the character
of spam has changed, plus some rules depend on SA code which also may
have changed. If you've added custom rules to the config files under
/usr/share/spamassassin, you'll need to diff those against the originals
and extract your changes. Custom rules in ~/.spamassassin/user_prefs
will be preserved but like those in /etc/mail/spamassassin, they'll need
to be reviewed to see if they conflict with the current version of SA.

From INSTALL:

----
"Note For Users Upgrading From SpamAssassin 2.3x or 2.4x
-------------------------------------------------------

SpamAssassin no longer includes code to handle local mail delivery, as it
was not reliable enough, compared to procmail. So now, if you relied on
spamassassin to write the mail into your mail folder, you'll have to
change your setup to use procmail as detailed below. If you used
spamassassin to filter your mail and then something else wrote it into a
folder for you, then you should be fine.

Support for versions of the optional Mail::Audit module is no longer
included.

The default mode of tagging (which used to be ***SPAM*** in the subject
line) no longer takes place. Instead the message is rewritten."
----

One important question: which version of perl do you have? IIRC, 2.6x is
the last version that will support perl 5.005. Aside from that, you'll
want to freshen your perl installation (perl -MCPAN -e shell; then use
the 'r' command to see what's out of date and upgrade those modules as
prudent.) Then install the prerequisites for 2.63:

- ExtUtils::MakeMaker >= 5.45 (included in Perl 5.6.1 and later)
- HTML::Parser >= 3.24 (from CPAN)
- Sys::Syslog (from CPAN)

and probably

- DB_File (from CPAN, included in many distributions)
- Digest::SHA1 (from CPAN)
- Net::DNS (from CPAN)
- Time::HiRes (from CPAN)

Maybe it's best to install SA to a local user account, test it, then
upgrade the system once you're comfortable with the new version.

> I've heard 2.63 needs to get "trained" where as 2.11 did not, how
> hard is this process as we don't save spam here but just mark it and
> thats all.

You can run SA with or without network tests, and with or without the
Bayesian (statistical) classifier. Training SA is fairly simple; if you
can save at least 200 pieces each of spam and ham (not-spam), you can
use sa-learn to initially train the Bayesian analyzer. It can also
autolearn, learning from messages above or below some learning
thresholds but this will take much longer. If you don't care, just
disable Bayes. SA should work just fine without it.

It's pretty easy for people here to tell you to upgrade, it's another
matter completely to upgrade without your users ever knowing. I think
you'll be happier with a more recent version; if you have any questions,
please ask.

Good luck!

-- Bob

At 01:19 11/02/2004, George Kasica wrote:
> >On Tue, 10 Feb 2004 16:54:00 +1300, you wrote:
>
> >At 16:48 10/02/2004, George Kasica wrote:
> >>In the last 3-4 days I'd suddenly seen a massive drop in speed in SA
> >>2.11 here I occasionally see the an error series like this:
> >
> >Err,
> >
> >SA 2.11 ?
> >
> >Sounds extremely ancient to me, considering 2.63 is the latest. Any version
> >earlier than 2.6 is going to have "issues" out of the box, such as trying
> >to query RBL lists that no longer exist, and if you really are running 2.11
> >this is likely why...
> >
> >Regards,
> >Simon
>OK, I'll admit its old, let me ask the next question, how hard is the
>upgrade to the current 2.63 version. I'm not a perl wizard, but am a
>decent Unix admin. Is there a way to convert the existing rule sets?
>I've heard 2.6.3 needs to get "trained" where as 2.11 did not, how
>hard is this process as we don't save spam here but just mark it and
>thats all.
>
>Thanks,.

Well the first version I ever used was 2.44 so I have *no* idea what the
changes since 2.11 might be. (I'd say probably fairly drastic) Basically
you need to look through the readme and install files and perhaps test it
on a test machine. 2.11 is so old now that its probably missing a lot of
spam anyway. (Kind of like having a virus scanner thats 2 years out of date)

The training you're refering to is for the bayesian classifier, you don't
necessarily have to use it, or (like me) you can use a global bayes
database with autolearning which works better than nothing at all.

Good luck.

Regards,
Simon