[Pkg-exim4-users] spamassassin headers

[Chris Purves]

Marc Haber wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 21, 2006 at 09:39:46AM +0800, Chris Purves wrote:
>> This doesn't answer your question directly, but I use sa-exim and it 
>> makes it very simple for integration of spamassassin with exim.
> 
> What's the advantage of sa-exim over exim's built-in ACL-based
> spamassassin interface?
> 

That's a good question and one I've been wondering about myself lately. 
  I haven't used the built-in spamassassin ACL, but from what I 
understand from the exim specicification, you cannot make use of changes 
made to the message by spamassassin.  I believe that Andreas Metzler 
confirms this.

I like to have spamassassin write the test results to the headers and 
sa-exim allows this.  Also, if you're not comfortable with editing the 
exim configuration, sa-exim has a separate configuration file.  This was 
a big plus for me when I installed it six months ago, since I didn't 
understand the exim configuration.

One of the features promoted by the author, but not used by me, is the 
ability to teergrube: hold an incoming spam connection for some minutes 
thereby using up the spammers' resources.

You can also greylist, although I haven't used this.  Basically during 
receiving you tell the sender to try again later, then you decide if you 
want to accept the mail next time.

It also allows you to save copies of all types of mail.  This was useful 
for me when I was making a lot of configuration changes to spamassassin 
and I wanted to see the messages I was rejecting.

All in all, I don't think it does anything that you couldn't do with 
exim natively, but it's less work.  And comparing directly with the 
built-in spam ACL the ability to modify the message is the major 
difference for me.

I'm interested to hear what others have to say.

-- 
Good day, eh.
Chris