Dropbear

Tag: dspam

  • No more dspam, now what?

    I was surprised at first to see that a long-standing bug in dspam had been fixed. Until that is, I realised it was from the Debian ftp masters and the reason the bug was closing was that dspam was being removed from the Debian archive.

     

    Damn!

     

    So, now what? What is a good replacement for dspam that is actually maintained? I don’t need anti-virus because mutt just ignores those sorts of things and besides youbankdetails.zip.exe doesn’t run too well on Debian. dspam basically used tokens to find common patterns of spam and ham, with you bouncing misses so it learnt from its mistakes. Already got postgrey running for greylisting so its really something that does the bayesan filtering.

     

    Some intial comments:

    • bogfilter looks interesting and seems the closest thing so far
    • cluebringer aka policyd seems like a policy and bld type of spam filter, not bayesan
    • I’ve heard crm114 is good but hard to use
    • spamassasin – I used to use this, not sure why I stopped

    There really is only me on the mailserver with a pretty light load so no need to worry about efficiencies.  Not sure if it matters but my MTA is postfix and I already use procmail for delivery.

     

     

  • Be careful with dspam and multi-arch

    Do you use the Debian dspam packages, specifically with one of the database backends? Recently upgraded the packages? Does noone email you anymore?

    You might be bitten by a bug, or perhaps undocumented misfeature, that bit me this morning. No emails were coming in and yet the mailserver logs said they were coming in, but a closer look at the logs showed this:

    Aug 15 09:08:17 elmo dspam[24896]: dlopen() failed: /usr/lib/dspam/libpgsql_drv.so: /usr/lib/dspam/libpgsql_drv.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

    What happened here? A quick look at the installed packages said the pgsql backend was still installed but this file was not being found.

    The latest version of libdspam7-drv-pgsql now has multiarch support which means /usr/lib/dspam no longer exists and the driver is found in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dspam. The problem happens because the configuration file specifies the directory and that has now changed. The fix is as simple, update /etc/dspam/dspam.conf with the new path.