OK, this is OT but I spent the last couple of nights figuring this out, so I thought I would share. I have my hosting setup at home fairly complete, including a mail server running XMail (www.xmailserver.org). After much grappling, last week I managed to get SpamAssassin installed and configured *in very basic form* to block obvious spam from my mailboxes. It works astonishingly well, and has all kinds of cool stuff available for you to tweak and improve your blocking accuracy.
Anyway, I have been basking in the glory of my SpamAssassin triumph, but there has been one nagging problem in my setup. SpamAssassin is written in Perl, and because of the startup penalty with the Perl interpreter, it is rather slow to process a message. There is a daemon for SA to allow you to get around this problem, but it only runs on *nix (something to do with the fork command on Win32). I read comments about servers pegged to 100% cpu/RAM and falling over under load because of serial SA calls. Well, that offended my sense of server esthetics, so I needed a solution. Fortunately, there is a solution. Not that I relish the opportunity to work with Perl, but hey, I will gladly reap the benefits of other people's hard work. The solution is a product called Scope (http://www.saltstorm.net/depo/scopee/), a procedure engine for Perl on Win32. You can install it as a service (using instsrv.exe and srvany.exe) and then plugin your own Perl routines to accomplish whatever you want. The author has configured it, among other things, to call SpamAssassin from XMail when new messages come in. Not to belabor this story, but I had a bitch of a time installing this thing. The instructions were more than a little confusing and the installer routine flat didn't work, or maybe worked better with an earlier version of ActivePerl. I had to get the latest update of ActivePerl and manually install 15 or so Perl modules using PPM. Easy enough except that most of the modules were not in the common repositories, so I had to hunt them down in Google, in the source docs for Scope, etc. I think I've put 10-12 hours into this installation by now. So much for "free" software. But at least I have the service running - victory is mine! If anyone is interested, or just wants to flog themselves with the installer, I would be happy to share my experiences. Rob ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Find out how CFTicket can increase your company's customer support efficiency by 100% http://www.houseoffusion.com/banners/view.cfm?bannerid=49 Message: http://www.houseoffusion.com/lists.cfm/link=i:5:146373 Archives: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/threads.cfm/5 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/lists.cfm/link=s:5 Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.5 Donations & Support: http://www.houseoffusion.com/tiny.cfm/54
