Spam avoidance techniques

Spam avoidance techniques

Posted Sep 12, 2002 5:35 UTC (Thu) by fcrozat (subscriber, #175)
Parent article: Spam avoidance techniques

Since SpamAssassin is written in perl, when you use it through procmail, a new perl intepreter is started for each message.. This is the main cause of the high "run time" figure.

To prevent this from happening, you should use the spamc/spamd tools which are shipped with SpamAssassin :

Spamd is a daemon which starts a spamassassin process which is kept in memory, fixing the startup latency problem of SpamAssassin.
Spamc is a client which connect to spamd and can be used instead of spamassassin in procmail rules (replace "spamassassin -P" with "spamc").

You should try it, runtime will probably more reasonable.

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Spam avoidance techniques

Posted Sep 12, 2002 7:36 UTC (Thu) by Dom2 (guest, #458) [Link]

I do this and it makes spamassassin usable over my dialup. At this point, most of my runtime costs are DNS lookups from spamd.

-Dom

spamc/spamd

Posted Sep 12, 2002 14:28 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

You know, mentioning (if not trying) the spamc/spamd pair was on my list as I put the article together, but somehow in the excitement of ordering all those bulk email lists I dropped it. It's really true that reading your spam rots the brain.

I just ran the 5000-message linux-kernel test using spamd. The filtering results were the same, of course, and the run time dropped to 2400 seconds. That's a big speed improvement, but still an order of magnitude slower than bogofilter.