Re: [exim] question regarding spamassassin in exim, especial…

Phil Pennock wrote:

> SpamAssassin's added headers rely upon the message itself being
> transported through SA, modified by it, before delivery.
>
> By contrast, Exim is asking spamd to take a look at the message and
> report back on it; spamd doesn't get to modify the message at all.
>

OK. Based on that I commented out the spamd parts of acl_check_data
(which was still needed for clamav) and then set this:

local_scan_path = /usr/lib/exim/sa-exim.so

Figuring that perhaps if it ran at the smtp stage spamassassin could
modify the headers. Turns out that was correct, the headers are added,
and in very limited testing, the scores seem to be the same as before.

I don't have a grasp on the relative benefits of doing the spam checking
in these two different ways, beyond the observation that the sa-exim one
ends up with the headers spamassassin is configured to add. Since there
is usually no free lunch, I'm guessing sa-exim is slower, user more
resources, or has some other problem I don't know about yet...

Thanks,

David Mathog
mathog@???
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech