Autolearn=disabled in SpamAssassin?

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  • abennett
    Junior Member
    • Feb 2005
    • 4

    Autolearn=disabled in SpamAssassin?

    I've been having a little trouble with the amount of spam coming in on our inboxes. I've checked (and double checked) that SpamAssassin is setup fine, and catching the obvious messages. On reviewing a year's worth of messages, I've found that sometime around 7/24/06 the SA header for "autolearn" returns "disabled" (rather than Spam or Ham).

    It doesn't seem to correspond with the SA upgrade from 3.1.3 to 3.1.4 that happened four days later, but even now (version 3.1.6) autolearn is still set to disabled.

    I'm not 100% confident, but I think a big part of my increase in spam has been that SA is not autolearning. Is there a reason it's set not to autolearn, and am I missing something in WHM & cpanel to turn it on?

    Oh, and I'm on server 22.
    Cheers,
    Aaron
  • magic168
    Junior Member
    • Apr 2004
    • 8

    #2
    Same issue here. I was on cpanel11 before the crash and when setting everything back on cpanel54, I needed to turn on SpamAssasin and saw that Autolearn=Off....

    How do we turn it back on? I've been getting a LOT of spam.

    Comment

    • AndrewT
      Administrator
      • Mar 2004
      • 3653

      #3
      Bayes scoring is disabled on servers that have not been upgraded to our new server platform in order to reduce the rather extreme performance hit that it places on the server.

      This should not be an issue with newer servers like cpanel54, please submit a ticket with the full message headers.

      Ultimately we've found that SpamAssassin is not very reliable, especially between upgrades. If spam is a big problem for you I would consider getting a Postini account. We only use Postini now and it is nearly perfect at tagging e-mails. We also have many customers using it with great success.

      Comment

      • abennett
        Junior Member
        • Feb 2005
        • 4

        #4
        Andrew, thanks for the information. I was doing sa-learn on my spambox and the process was killed off by root and a broadcast message was sent:

        Broadcast message from root (pts/0) (Fri Oct 27 11:32:17 2006):
        abennett, please refrain from running the sa-learn processes at this time

        Oops! I'm sorry about that! I didn't mean to bog down the server at all. However, could you let me know when it is an appropriate time to run sa-learn?

        Comment

        • AndrewT
          Administrator
          • Mar 2004
          • 3653

          #5
          That was me. Please run it in the early morning (before 6AM) or late evening (after 10PM). sa-learn can be quite the resource hog, especially on large mailboxes.

          Comment

          • abennett
            Junior Member
            • Feb 2005
            • 4

            #6
            Andrew, thanks for the info. I'll pay closer attention next time and use it only at the times you suggest. Again, I'm sorry for causing any sort of hassle, especially if I made anyone interrupt their work.

            Just so I can be clear, what time zone are you referring to? CST? PST?

            Comment

            • AndrewT
              Administrator
              • Mar 2004
              • 3653

              #7
              No problem at all. All times by us are in central.

              Comment

              • chrisd
                Member
                • Mar 2004
                • 44

                #8
                Originally posted by AndrewT
                Bayes scoring is disabled on servers that have not been upgraded to our new server platform
                Speaking of which, and sa01 ....

                I notice some custom scores (set via cpanel or manually edited) not listed in the headers -- looks like the defaults.

                How does this work for our local user_prefs -- are they still being read?

                ...Chris

                Comment

                • AndrewT
                  Administrator
                  • Mar 2004
                  • 3653

                  #9
                  SpamAssassin scoring was moved to its own dedicated server quite a while ago. Scoring e-mails alone was one of the most system resource intensive processes on our servers. Moving this to its own dedicated server helped overall performance on our servers tremendously.

                  With its own server it is also able to keep up with large incoming e-mail spikes. Previously the individual servers could get overloaded at times with large quantities of incoming e-mails. When this happened, the server would simply deliver the e-mails without scoring them at all. This is now much less of an issue.

                  The downside is that you really cannot configure SpamAssassin. For example, the required score is set to 5 server-wide for it to rewrite e-mail subjects with ***SPAM***. However, you can still configure the auto-delete function in cPanel to delete e-mails based on any score you wish. You can also extensively setup filters to filter e-mail based on their score thanks to the new SpamAssassin header format (mainly the +++++ scoring).

                  Comment

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