Where do I configure spamassassin in Mountain Lion Server?

It may be easier to install spamtrainer as it will help you not only with the configuration but provides numerous features not included in Apple's standard scripts. It also has an optional nightly report from when it runs.

I thought I was getting close here.

I have installed spamtrainer, but am embarrassed to say I haven't yet figured out how to use it.

Did you try reading the documentation? Try sudo spamtrainer help

If messages are gone from junkmail's inbox folder then filter is being trained. It takes a while before spamassassin's database fills up and actually starts acting on spam. It doesn't work right away because it has too little data. You also need to create "notjunkmail" user and copy non-spam emails to it so that the filter knows what is NOT spam for you. That is equally very important. It works the same way as junkmail.

Check that you have "blacklist filtering" enabled in serveradmin's mail section. It should point to zen.spamhaus.org. Check the "minimum score for junk mail", it may be set too high, but don't change it just yet.

There are two things to try to check if filtering is actually working properly.

First, check the headers of your incoming email (especiall spam). You must see a line similar to

X-Spam-Status: No, score=5.226 tagged_above=1 required=5.8 tests=[BAYES_50=0.8, DKIM_SIGNED=0.1, HTML_MESSAGE=0.001, RP_MATCHES_RCVD=-0.513, SPF_HELO_PASS=-0.001, SPF_PASS=-0.001, SUBJ_ALL_CAPS=1.506, T_DKIM_INVALID=0.01, URIBL_DBL_SPAM=1.7, URIBL_RED=0.001, URIBL_SBL=1.623]

Look if you have BAYES_xx in there. If you don't have it at all, it may indicate that spamassassin isn't working properly.

So, second, save one of your spam messages as 'source', put it on the server somewhere and try feeding it to spamassassin:

sudo cat spammessage.eml | spamassassin -D

You will see the usual debug output and in the end the message itself with X-Spam-Status line added somewhere. Check to see what BAYES_ value your mail message has there. If there isn't one, study the output to see if there are any problems with bayes database. Specifically you should see lines very similar to

dbg: bayes: tie-ing to DB file R/O /Library/Server/Mail/Data/scanner/amavis/.spamassassin/bayes_toks

dbg: bayes: tie-ing to DB file R/O /Library/Server/Mail/Data/scanner/amavis/.spamassassin/bayes_seen

dbg: bayes: found bayes db version 3

dbg: bayes: DB journal sync: last sync: 1401648815

If there are errors, you will see those there.

Your /Library/Server/Mail/Config/spamassassin/local.cf file location is perfectly fine. No need to change anything. It means if you ever wish to change spamassassin settings, you would edit that file and not any other local.cf anywhere else on the system.

I wouldn't recommend spamtrainer personally as stock server functionality works just fine.

If you do indeed have X-Spam-Status and BAYES in every email you get, then look carefully at the score. Your message gets a certain spam score that doesn't exceed the threshold marked as "required=xx". You need to understand why that happens.

The help just shows a list of things like:

-d to delete read/learned mailboxes

but no info on how to actually use it.

Anyway, when I ran what you said above, I got the following repeated for about a minute:

bayes: cannot open bayes databases /Library/Server/Mail/Data/scanner/amavis/.spamassassin/bayes_* R/O: tie failed: Permission denied

bayes: cannot open bayes databases /Library/Server/Mail/Data/scanner/amavis/.spamassassin/bayes_* R/O: tie failed: Permission denied

bayes: cannot open bayes databases /Library/Server/Mail/Data/scanner/amavis/.spamassassin/bayes_* R/W: tie failed: Permission denied

ERROR: the Bayes learn function returned an error, please re-run with -D for more information at /Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot/usr/bin/sa-learn line 493.

Then at the end:

Learned new SPAM (junk mail)

Learning HAM...

Learned new HAM (not junk mail)

Syncing SpamAssassin Database

bayes: cannot open bayes databases /Library/Server/Mail/Data/scanner/amavis/.spamassassin/bayes_* R/O: tie failed: Permission denied

bayes: cannot open bayes databases /Library/Server/Mail/Data/scanner/amavis/.spamassassin/bayes_* R/W: tie failed: Permission denied

Displaying SpamAssassin Database Stats

bayes: cannot open bayes databases /Library/Server/Mail/Data/scanner/amavis/.spamassassin/bayes_* R/O: tie failed: Permission denied

bayes: cannot open bayes databases /Library/Server/Mail/Data/scanner/amavis/.spamassassin/bayes_* R/O: tie failed: Permission denied

ERROR: Bayes dump returned an error, please re-run with -D for more information

Done!

Output produced by spamtrainer Version 2.0.0

Then based on that last ine I tried:

sudo spamtrainer -D

Then I got:

/usr/sbin/spamtrainer: illegal option -- D

Junk Mail Training Script for OS X 10.9, 10.8

usage: [ -p mailpartition] [ -j junk_mailbox] [ -n notjunk_mailbox] [ -b filename] [ -r filename] [ -s path_to_sa-learn] [ -d ] [ -x number_of_days] [ -l] [ -c]

-p to specify a mail partition or store other than default

-d to delete read/learned mailboxes

-x to specify how old mail must be to be deleted

-j to specify the name of the mailbox containing junk

-n to specify the name of the mailbox containing good mail

-b to backup spamassassin bayes database to file

-r to restore spamassassin bayes database from file

-s to specify the path to the sa-learn program

-c to clean/purge the SpamAssassin database

-l to log bayes stats into /var/log/spamtrainer.log

-i to install/check the automatic startup item

-v to display the version of this script

-t to to use shared/top level folders instead of a user mailbox

-h to display this help message

So, I know I've got something broken in both the default and the spamtrainer usages.

Yep. That's a known problem. Was this an upgrade from an older version of Server?

Anyhow, to fix this (albeit, temporarily) you need to issue the following commands:

sudo chown -R amavisd:amavisd /Library/Server/Mail/Data/scanner/amavis/.spamassassin/

sudo chmod u+rw /Library/Server/Mail/Data/scanner/amavis/.spamassassin/*

Then re-run spamassassin -D --lint to see if the problem with permissions is gone.

Buckiejoe,

I did make a "notjunkmail" account but have not been feeding it anything becausae I thought it was only to feed messages marked as spam. I have not been getting any messages marked as spam.

So are you saying that I should be feeding the notjunkmail account with good messages and then it might start working?

I'll check the rest of the stuff you mentioned. Thanks!

No, that's just good practice. The reason why it's not working is because your ownership rights on spam database are not correct. Perhaps it hasn't even been trained once. Take a look at the size of the database (bayes_seen, bayes_toks)

ls -lh /Library/Server/Mail/Data/scanner/amavis/.spamassassin/

If it's only a few kilobytes in size then it's empty.

This can also happen if commands have been run by a user other than amavisd. When you run ls -al on the command line from your usual admin account's home directory (do cd ~) what so you see as output?

Buckiejoe,

I ran that and got:

total 15288

-rw------- 1 _amavisd _amavisd 2.5M Jun 1 02:27 bayes_seen

-rw------- 1 root _amavisd 5.0M Jun 1 02:27 bayes_toks

So I guess not empty, but I just don't see any spam control happening.

Matt,

so here is what that gives me:

prepress:~ server2$ cd ~

prepress:~ server2$ ls -al

total 11800

drwxr-xr-x+ 25 server2 staff 850 May 23 14:18 .

drwxr-xr-x+ 18 root admin 612 Apr 23 17:30 ..

-rw-------+ 1 server2 staff 3 Jan 24 2013 .CFUserTextEncoding

-rw-r--r--@ 1 server2 staff 24580 Mar 9 18:02 .DS_Store

drwx------+ 2 server2 staff 68 May 23 15:32 .Trash

-rw-------+ 1 server2 staff 56532 Jun 1 12:15 .bash_history

-rw-r--r--+ 1 server2 staff 185 Aug 29 2013 .bash_profile

drwxr-xr-x+ 3 root staff 102 May 23 14:18 .cpan

drwx------+ 3 server2 staff 102 May 22 17:41 .cups

drwx------+ 7 server2 staff 238 Sep 17 2013 .filezilla

-rw-r--r--@ 1 server2 staff 230 Sep 17 2013 .htaccess

-rw-------+ 1 server2 staff 57 May 23 09:37 .lesshst

-rw-------+ 1 server2 staff 1024 Sep 10 2013 .rnd

drwx------+ 2 server2 staff 68 Jan 21 12:06 .spamassassin

-rw-------+ 1 root staff 1118 Aug 19 2013 .viminfo

-rw-r--r--+ 1 server2 staff 0 Oct 8 2013 1000K

drwx------+ 26 server2 staff 884 May 29 07:43 Desktop

drwx------+ 3 server2 staff 102 Jan 24 2013 Documents

drwx------+ 6 server2 staff 204 Feb 4 11:04 Downloads

drwx------@ 43 server2 staff 1462 Sep 11 2013 Library

drwx------+ 3 server2 staff 102 Jan 24 2013 Movies

drwx------+ 4 server2 staff 136 Sep 10 2013 Music

drwx------+ 5 server2 staff 170 Feb 5 12:36 Pictures

drwxr-xr-x+ 4 server2 staff 136 Jan 24 2013 Public

-rw-r--r--@ 1 server2 staff 1977464 Sep 5 2013 Users

prepress:~ server2$

So waht is this telling me?

OK, so also I was checking the headers of a bunch spam messages and this was a typical one:

Nothing about Bayes in there.

Now before sending this, I went in and turned the filter down to 2. Now some messages are getting tagged with ***JUNK*** and Bayes is in the haeder. Did I just have the filter set too high?

Also, do I continue to feed the messages tagged with ***JUNK*** into the junkmail account?

The .spamassassin shouldn't exist in the user folder for your admin account; I suspect the script was invoked by your admin user instead of the amavisd user at some point. I'd delete .spamassassin from your admin account home folder and then try to run spamtrainer again; it should run with no errors. If it does, you can set it up to run instead of Apple's scripts, which we can walk you through in terms of setup.

With regards to junk mail filtering, and moving those messages into the junk folder, that will require setting up sieve scripts. First you need to enable sieve on the command line, and then setup an admin UI for the scripts (or manage them from the command line) to do the filtering.

Many people use Roundcube to do this on OS X Server, which has a plugin to manage the filtering scrips and also gives you a webmail interface.

Lack of BAYES_xx in headers means it doesn't work.

Your permissions are wrong again. bayes_toks must be owned by amavisd user, not root. Try issuing chown command again (see above) to reset them and run

sudo -u amavisd spamassassin -D --lint

Look for database errors in the output as we already discussed above. Check if the "tie-ing to DB file R/O" is successfull for both files or if it complains again. I advise not to use any spamtrainers or anything else right now. You need to set your basic filtering process back on track, after that you may go ahead an experiment with other tools.

Your junk mail score is definitely set too low right now. Better set it back to whatever it was, otherwise you risk filtering out a lot of good mail.