MailScanner Installation Guide — SpamAssassin

SpamAssassin (currently on V2.60) can be a bit of a pig to install, so here is a guide of what I last did (on a Cobalt RaQ as it happened) to install it.

Download Mail-SpamAssassin-2.60.tar.gz from www.spamassassin.org into somewhere sensible such as /root or /tmp.
If the site is down, search Google for the file and you'll find a copy.
# perl -MCPAN -e shell
Whenever it asks for manual configuration, say no.
cpan> o conf prerequisites_policy ask
Stops it running away and installing loads of extras.
cpan> install Time::HiRes
cpan> install Net::DNS
cpan> quit
# tar xzf Mail-SpamAssassin-2.60.tar.gz
# cd Mail-SpamAssassin-2.60
# perl Makefile.PL
# make
You may now get some errors about pod2text. If you do, then do this command:
# ln -s /usr/bin/pod2man /usr/bin/pod2text
# make
# make test
This will fail horribly due to the lack of the file Pod/Usage.pm so now do this to install it:
# perl -MCPAN -e shell
cpan> o conf prerequisites_policy ask
cpan> install Pod::Usage
cpan> quit
# make test
This time, the tests should succeed. They can take a while.
# make install

You now have installed SpamAssassin. The next step is to configure it and MailScanner.

  1. In /etc/MailScanner/MailScanner.conf, I would advise you set "Log Spam = yes" to start with.
  2. You will of course need "Use SpamAssassin = yes".
  3. If you don't have a very fast link, increase "SpamAssassin Timeout" to nearer 20.

Then just kill and restart MailScanner and you're up and running.
# check_MailScanner
(This will print out the pids of the MailScanner processes)
Kill those pids with the "kill" command
#


Julian Field