[Mimedefang] Disable SpamAssassin

John Rudd john at rudd.cc
Thu Sep 8 03:18:43 EDT 2005


So, I have a particular configuration on my work machines (which run 
solaris 8, unlike the previous discussion about running mimedefang at 
home on Mac OS X, a few weeks ago).  Here's the specifics (note: this 
is mimedefang-2.52):


1) local things go in /local (which is always local to the machine) not 
in /usr/local (which may or may not be on the network).  This is 
important for security related packages, which should always be local 
to the machine.  Email config stuff, in particular, that we don't want 
to be clobbered by OS updates/etc. go into /local/mail.  So this is 
where we want the mimedefang-filter and all other useful things to be 
found (for example, the aliases file, the mailertable, the sendmail.cf 
file, etc.).  I have added the following to my configure line, just 
want to be sure that this covers it all:

   --sysconfdir=/local/mail --with-confsubdir=

That part looks like it worked even.  When I ran mimedefang.pl 
-features (from the build dir, before running "make install") it 
complained that I hadn't put mimedefang-filter into /local/mail.  Good 
sign.

Is there any other setting I have missed, though, that might cause 
configuration data to be looked for in other directories?


What did NOT look good, is this:

2) We're migrating away from MailScanner right now.  We may go entirely 
with MimeDefang, or we may go with Sophos PureMessage, or maybe with 
something else .  We're still deciding (in fact, we already sent and 
RFI to roaring penguin a few months ago, I'm also jrudd at ucsc.edu ... 
based on how things are going with some of our other candidates, and 
how much I have liked MimeDefang so far, I'm thinking about re-opening 
our evaluation of the Can-It products).

In the mean time, we're moving virus scanning to mimedefang, and 
keeping spam assassin in MailScanner (reduce latency between when a 
client hits "send" and when the message actually disappears from their 
screen).  So, I need to disable SpamAssassin in MimeDefang.  BUT ... 
SpamAssassin IS installed on the machines in question.

I put this into the configure line:

--disable-SpamAssassin

But, configure still looked for and found SpamAssassin, and 
mimedefang.pl -features still reports it as found.  While I have 
removed all references to SA in mimedefang-filter, I am concerned that 
I am going to be doing things like wasting memory footprint on SA being 
loaded into mimedefang, even though the filter never calls it.




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