Dirk große Osterhues

Spamassassin already ships with the nice feature of running automatic updates to its core rules by using sa-update. Customisation of this update process is not well documented though. So it will be described in this article.

At http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/CustomRulesets quite some additional channels are listed. As an example the configuration of the German Language Ruleset will be outlined.

The Spamassassin Channel is documented on that website and says:

Available at: SpamAssassin Channel: 70_zmi_german.cf.zmi.sa-update.dostech.net

In your local Spamassassin's setup the update rules reside at /var/lib/spamassassin/{SA_VERSION_NUMBER}. There, you may want to add the new channel definition by introducing the according gpg-key as follows:

wget http://daryl.dostech.ca/sa-update/sare/GPG.KEY
sa-update --import GPG.KEY

Now, a manual channel update for that particular channel can be run:

sa-update --channel 70_zmi_german.cf.zmi.sa-update.dostech.net  --gpgkey 856AA88A

In order to have the cron-triggered nightly sa-update-run also update the new channel, a hook for sa-update has to be defined in /etc/spamassassin/sa-update-hooks.d/. There, create a file called german-rules-updates with the following content:

#!/bin/sh
sa-update --channel 70_zmi_german.cf.zmi.sa-update.dostech.net  --gpgkey 856AA88A

The German rules should now be updated each day and become active thereafter.