On 2026-01-07 at 23:25:42 UTC-0500 (Wed, 7 Jan 2026 21:25:42 -0700)
Philip Prindeville via users <[email protected]>
is rumored to have said:
As best as I know, I invoke spamassassin via the mimedefang hook.
Standard historical behavior in MIMEDefang is to use SpamAssassin via
its own import of the libraries and calling the relevant routines
directly, rather than using the SpamAssassin Client spamc or talking its
protocol to spamd processes. If you are using MIMEDefang you therefore
DO NOT NEED to run a spamd daemon.
The latest version of MD (3.5) includes an alternative mechanism of
using Mail::SpamAssassin::Client, and if you are using that, then you DO
need to run spamd.
Historically, MD has used /etc/mail/sa-mimedefang.cf or
/etc/mail/spamassassin/sa-mimedefang.cf as its primary SA config file
instead of local.cf, so if that exists it may be pointing at the wrong
rules location.
In any case, you need to restart MIMEdefang for it to pick up rule
changes.
On Jan 7, 2026, at 8:14 PM, David B Funk
<[email protected]> wrote:
Philip,
There's probably some other mechanism that is using SA in some way
which you are not 'looking' at.
For example, AMAVISD imports the SA perl "engine" within itself and
doesn't use 'spamd' at all.
You may have some kind of filter-chain in your MSA (postfix maybe?)
that is invoking "spamassassin" as a filter process and configured to
use SA from some other directory.
Try stopping your 'spamd' and send yourself mail. If it's still
getting filtered then you haven't found the actual SA agent, time to
do some detective work.
On Wed, 7 Jan 2026, Philip Prindeville via users wrote:
Hi all,
I'm on Fedora 43 running spamassassin-4.0.1-7.
A rule involving sendgrid.net was causing false positives so I tried
to comment it on in spamassassin/sa-rules.cf and restarted the
service.
No dice. I was still getting matches against it.
So I changed the name and lowered the score and did a service
stop/start just in case. No change!!! The rule by the old name was
still getting matches.
What's going on? That's not supposed to be able to happen.
What would cause it to hold onto an old version of the file even
after restarting? Is there a cache I'm not aware of?
I did a "ps -ef | grep -e spamd -e spamassassin" after the "stop"
just to make sure the processes were all being cleaned up. They
were.
So how is this happening?
Thanks,
-Philip
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