SpamAssassin

Chapter 7. Integrating SpamAssassin with qmail

qmail is a mail transport agent written by cryptography researcher Dan Bernstein and designed to provide a highly secure mail system. It consists of several components, each of which runs with least privilege and none of which trusts data from the other without validating it itself. qmail works best in concert with several other systems designed by Bernstein that take over other functions traditionally performed by standard system utilities.

This chapter explains how to integrate SpamAssassin into a qmail-based mail server to perform spam-checking for local recipients or to create a spam-checking mail gateway.

Warning

qmail is a complex piece of software and, like most MTAs, offers scores of configuration choices. This chapter assumes that you are running the netqmail 1.05 version of qmail 1.03 and does not cover how to securely install, configure, or operate qmail itself. For that information, see the qmail documentation, David Sill’s Life with qmail web site (http://www.lifewithqmail.org) and The qmail Handbook by David Sill (Apress) or qmail by John Levine (O’Reilly).

This chapter assumes that you have set up your qmail system as described in Life with qmail and that you are using the recommended daemontools and ucspi-tcp packages.

qmail Architecture

Several different qmail components play roles in receiving messages from the Internet. Messages from the Internet typically enter the mail server via the qmail-smtpd daemon, ...