Ken, Aaron, others:

I maintain a pure Win32 "PerlScript" (some COM programming as well)
working as an Exchange Event Sink on the SMTP interface.

I was working with 2.63 and upgraded to 3.04, and will be upgrading to
3.10 (or whatever is stable at the time I take the leap) soon.  The code
mods from 2.63 to 3.04 were significant, but with the benefit of
hindsight, it looks like I was coding for something that turned out to
be a part of a bugzilla note, and fixed in a later release.

I've been running while only upgrading features for the last 6 - 12
months. 

I am using the built-in "PerlScript" interpreter that installs with
Activestate Perl for the Windows Scripting Host, ASP usage, etc, so
Windows calls perl via the Hosted Scripting Engine.

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="PerlScript">
#inside a VBS file
use Mail::SpamAssassin;
Etc
Etc
Etc
</SCRIPT> 

At the base of the script, it uses CDO to read the message and pass it
to SpamAssassin, and then SpamAssassin's API (just the subroutines) to
check the mail and mark it..  Then CDO again, to reimport the message as
a string (including attachments) back into the CDO message object in
order to hand it back to Exchange for delivery (or destruction).  It's
full of logging, etc.

If you want to look at it, and/or make comments/suggestions, and/or
request help installing it, I'd share very willingly. 

I, too, get less than 500 mails a day (real mails)..  And tons more spam
than real mail that SA tags for me.

As a matter of fact, this list accounts for most of the real mail that
my mail server sees in a day's time.

:)

Steven

-----Original Message-----
From: Ken Goods [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Wednesday, December 21, 2005 10:27 AM
To: 'SpamAssassin'
Subject: RE: Newbie looking for info...

Aaron Boyles wrote:
> New to the list, all, and looking for some info on SA.
> 
> First, my background:  I'm an applications developer using VB, and 
> have no experience with Linux, and only passing experience with 
> Exchange.  I am, however, well versed on the SMTP/POP3 protocols, and 
> have written a number of applications for both.
> 
> Here's the drill:  I've got an SMTP filter application currently 
> running that allows us to monitor traffic real-time on our servers, as

> we tend to get "hackers" trying to pry quite often.  The application 
> currently receives all E-Mails, dumps them to a folder (to allow our 
> virus scanner a chance at them) and then forwards them on to our mail 
> server.  I was hoping I could impliment SpamAssassin at this point in 
> the loop with a simple API or some such.
> 
> I know that the version of SpamAssassin available on the website can 
> be run in Windows as a server after a 43 step set-up process, but this

> isn't exactly what I'm looking for.  Does anyone know of a compiled 
> API version of SpamAssassin that would allow a programmer to simply 
> add the library to an application, and call it through API?
> 
> Any ideas would be appreciated!
> 
> -Aaron Boyles
> ITC Applications Programmer

Greets Aaron!

I am also a developer and have worked a lot with email on the windows
side.
I tried installing SA on win32 using the documented way a while back as
a first step in developing a hook into my own applications. I struggled
for quite a while to get something that would work as well as a native
SA installation and while it worked, it turned out to take more time and
to be more maintenance than I was up for. AFAIK there is no "API" for
spamassassin (others may know better) but I looked pretty hard a year
and a half ago. I'm afraid you'd have to get pretty deep into the
internals of SA (and Perl) and develop something on your own. At least
this was what I finally figured out.

But I still needed something between the mean old internet and our
exchange server. So I hit the boneyard and found an old P233 and loaded
Linux, MailScanner/Spamassassin/ClamAV and stuck it behind the firewall
and in front of the exchange server. Took an afternoon to get it up,
running, and configured. Couldn't be happier. I'm processing 5-8k emails
a day with a 100% virus detect rate and a 97%+ spam detect rate. I'm
sure I could get the spam detection up a little more if I wanted to
spend the time but this is fine for both me and management at this time.
Updates are easy thanks to Julian (the developer of MailScanner) as he
supplies a script to update both ClamAV and Spamassassin along with the
frequent MailScanner releases.

I can tell you're a "I want to do it myself" kind of guy (as am I), but
I'm hoping to save you a little time here. By the time you got something
working you'd might as well become one of the  Spamassassin developers.
:)

Just offered as an option to think about. But if you have tons of time
and want to pursue hooking into SA at the level you're talking about I'd
certainly be interested in seeing what you come up with. Hint... you'd
probably be looking at passing the email to spamscan and then deciding
how to handle it based on the spamscan markup much like what MailScanner
and amavis-new does. You may get some hints from the source of those
programs but then you've got the perl thing to think about.... my head
hurts... :)

Good luck,
Ken

Ken Goods
Network Administrator
AIA/CropUSA Insurance, Inc.




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