Setting up ASSP on CentOS 7 – punt

Spam Assassin is the default anti-spam package with Plesk, but for a server with no mail accounts it (at least for me) is useless as there’s no way to know what mail it’s rejecting. Experience with other systems has shown that astronomy related mail seems to be disliked by spam filters.

ASSP seems better suited to a system that doesn’t have local users (i.e. mailman, mail forwarding, etc.).  It also looks pretty complex to install and get running. And it’s not clear how it can get trained given (almost) no mailboxes. Using ASSP 2.5.1.

First problem after installing (unzipping…) was failing to load about a dozen perl modules. installed cpan to try and figure it out, but some of the packages seem to have problems installing and had to be manually installed. Keep checking moduleLoadErrors.txt until it’s clean (look at Can’t locate X in @INC to figure out what package is missing, which is probably different than the module that caused the error) (this took multiple iterations…several hours)

In cpan, install Term::ReadLine::Gnu to get a working console. It needs ncurses-devel and readline-devel to be installed.

ASSP will want to use ClamAV, which isn’t installed as Plesk uses their own AV. (and not sure I want to use it vs. the stuff included with Plesk, just doing this to make module errors go away) Looks like there’s no simple install on CentOS 7 for clamav (clamd was missing after following the directions).  Google for answers if this happens. (maybe this is helpful https://linux-audit.com/install-clamav-on-centos-7-using-freshclam/ ) Notes that those directions put clamd.conf not where clamd expects to find it (see man).

No response from the webserver. Can telnet to the server locally…Open port 55555 in the firewall(s). Change the default password (good luck, it’s buried somewhere that I can’t find again)

There’s a reference manual but so far no noob oriented “here’s how to get started for a simple system.” This tutorial seems the closest to that: https://vorkbaard.nl/installing-assp-spamfilter-on-ubuntu-server-14-04-lts/  though the stupid Linux system flavor differences don’t make it a brainless “copy these steps” for CentOS. As well as it’s for a way more complex setup than being done here.

There are comments about adding user(s) but so far have not found where that magical setting is.

Changed the smtp ports and restarted assp but it won’t respond on port 25, no error messages. The more I read about assp it does not seem like the right thing. Noticed when looking for more info about assp that spam assassin maybe can save reject messages so going to look at that as SA is already integrated in to Plesk, etc., so would probably be less headaches than assp.