I talked about the joys of running my own mail server last week only to find that my mail server was broken yesterday. Spamassassin stopped doing DNS lookups for RBL and SPF checks. I had one of these moments:

My logs looked like this: plugin: eval failed: available_nameservers: No DNS servers available! plugin: eval failed: available_nameservers: No DNS servers available! rules: failed to run NO_DNS_FOR_FROM RBL test, skipping: (available_nameservers: [.

I’ve used this extremely basic procmail configuration a million times, and it’s a great start for any server configuration. It passes e-mails through spamassassin (if they’re smaller than 256KB) and then filters any e-mail marked as spam to /dev/null: LOGFILE=/var/log/procmail.log DROPPRIVS=yes</p> <p>:0fw | /usr/bin/spamc</p> <p>:0 * ^X-Spam-Status: Yes /dev/null Of course, you can make this much more complicated with some additional customization.

One of my biggest complaints on RHEL 4 is the large resource usage by the version of SpamAssassin that is installed. When it runs, it uses a ton of CPU time and causes a lot of disk I/O as well. When running top, you may see multiple spamd processes. For a high-volume e-mail server (like the one I administer), this is simply unacceptable. I decided to do something about it, and here are the steps: