BigSmoke » SpamAssassin

Lowering Bayes score for Zimbra’s Spamassassin config

halfgaar — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 00:25:54 +0000

The Spamassassin config in Zimbra has a very high default score for bayes matching of 99, 95, 90, etc, percent. A mail with subject and body “test” or “asdfaewf a” is often marked as 99% bayes, even though the spamfilter has seen no training mail. This is absurd.

To amend this, I put this in /opt/zimbra/conf/spamassassin/local.cf:

score BAYES_99 2.500
score BAYES_95 2.000
score BAYES_90 1.500
score BAYES_85 1.000
score BAYES_80 0.500

Fixing spamassassin rule in Zimbra

halfgaar — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 18:15:17 +0000

Spamassassin has had a bug for a while, marking any mail from 2010 and later as spam because it’s from “far into the future”. This was very crudely done as this regexp: /20[1-9][0-9]/. Because of that, almost all mail from 2010 onward is marked as spam.

I Changed the regex to match for 2020 or later, but that’s not really a fix. Even the spamassassin maintainers ‘fixed’ it that way.

What I have to look out for though, is that this file may get overwritten when I upgrade zimbra. sa-update doesn’t seem to work on zimbra, so I don’t really know what the best way of getting new rules is.

Correcting Spamassassins stale mirror configuration

halfgaar — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 08:36:36 +0000

My spamassassin updates daily by running sa-update. Recently, I’ve been getting failure notices that mirror spamassassin.kluge.net was no longer available. This was because of a known bug, apparantly. So, I deleted the MIRROR.BY file and ran sa-update again.

This caused problem number two: GPG key verification failed. This was also a known issue, so I had to do:

wget http://spamassassin.apache.org/updates/GPG.KEY
sa-update --import GPG.KEY

And then everything was OK again.

Wiebe Hedde Cazemier

Rowan Rodrik — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 17:07:34 +0000

If you’re into Open Source software, 3D modeling or Do It Yourself audio, you may already know Wiebe under his on-line alias, Halfgaar. Personally, I’ve known him since I was 10 and he was 9. These days he’s still a very good friend, and even a colleague.

His Ferrari F50, not your usual lawn decoration.

Strongly straight-forward

As a very analytical, factual thinker, Wiebe is the kind of person who doesn’t run with the newest buzzwords. He simply says what he thinks and his thoughts usually follow from very sound and steady logic. As a programmer, this makes him invaluable. At times, as a human, this may make him hard to stomach if, as is usual, he is right and you are not. But, don’t worry: he will usually be kind enough to explain to you exactly—very exactly—why it is that you are wrong.

So, he may not be the type for marketing, but for anything that needs to be done robustly and thoroughly, he is irreplaceable.

Solid knowledge

System administration: As every Geek with family and friends, Wiebe has the obligatory knowledge of how to keep a network of Windows systems somewhat stable, but this knowledge is irrelevant compared to his experience and skill in Unix system administration. His favourite Linux distribution is Gentoo Linux and, as follows from his many posts to the Gentoo Forums, he is a Linux Guru indeed.
Backups: even to most system administrators, they’re just an afterthought, but he really knows his dar backups from your tar’s. And, he’s published about it too.
Audio-engineering requires an enormous level of insight in the complex dynamics of audio waves and electronics. To me, it’s mostly Chinese, but he has built his own amps, speakers and subwoofer. If he notices even the slightest artifact in the sound, he goes back to the drawing board and just redoes the circuits another time.

Learn more

Wiebe can be contacted at wiebe@halfgaar.net, unless if you’re a spammer, because he happens to be an expert-level SpamAssassin administrator.

Web presence

www.halfgaar.net – the official website.
His profile at the Gentoo Forums.
His profile at the Blender Artists Forum
His posts at the Dutch Gathering of Tweakers forum