Intregrate existing Procmail with with new SpamAssassin

Question

For many, many years, I have successfully been using procmail and it's recipes without issue, and I have many, many recipes.

A few weeks ago, my system adopted/started using spamassassin, and now those procmail recipes that have been used for years and years have stopped working.

I am but a regular user on the system, and the system administrator (and such) are not available for assistance.

Can someone tell me what I need to do to fix my procmail (or spamassassin), so it works like it did before? Before, it would place email with "SPAM" into a spam folder and various mailing lists into their own mailboxes. Now, it just marks spam as "***SPAM***" and my mailing lists remain in my inbox.

Any help, links, etc. are appreciated.

From my procmail.log file

procmail: [6769] Sun Jun 21 22:43:23 2015
procmail: Assigning "JFDIR=/arpa/tz/z/zaxxon/.junkfilter/junkfilter"
procmail: Assigning "JFUSERDIR=/arpa/tz/z/zaxxon/.junkfilter/junkfilter/user_bloo
cklist"
procmail: Assigning "FROM=^(From[  ]|(Old-|X-)?(Resent-)?(From|Reply-To|Sender)::
)(.*\<)?"
procmail: No match on "^Subject: Zaxxon envdump$"
procmail: Match on "< 256000"
procmail: Locking "spamassassin.lock"
procmail: Executing "spamassassin"
/bin/sh: Can't open spamassassin
procmail: Error while writing to "spamassassin"
procmail: Rescue of unfiltered data succeeded
procmail: Unlocking "spamassassin.lock"
procmail: No match on "^X-Spam-Level: \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*"
procmail: Match on "^X-Spam-Status: Yes"
procmail: Locking ".lock"
procmail: Assigning "LASTFOLDER="
procmail: Opening ""
procmail: Error while writing to ""
procmail: Unlocking ".lock"
procmail: No match on "^^rom[ ]"
procmail: No match on "^(From[     ]|(Old-|X-)?(Resent-)?(From|Reply-To|Sender)::
)(.*\<)?.*(facebook|pottermore|mangafox).*"
procmail: No match on "^(From[     ]|(Old-|X-)?(Resent-)?(From|Reply-To|Sender)::
)(.*\<)?.*(facebook|pottermore|mangafox).*"
procmail: No match on "^(From[     ]|(Old-|X-)?(Resent-)?(From|Reply-To|Sender)::
)(.*\<)?.*(archiveofourown|ficwad|tthfanfic|fanficauthors|sufficientvelocity).*"
procmail: No match on "^(From[     ]|(Old-|X-)?(Resent-)?(From|Reply-To|Sender)::
)(.*\<)?.*(archiveofourown|ficwad|tthfanfic|fanficauthors|sufficientvelocity).*"
procmail: No match on "^(From[     ]|(Old-|X-)?(Resent-)?(From|Reply-To|Sender)::
)(.*\<)?.*(empornium|pornhub|tumblr).*"
procmail: No match on "^(From[     ]|(Old-|X-)?(Resent-)?(From|Reply-To|Sender)::
)(.*\<)?.*(empornium|pornhub|tumblr).*"
procmail: Match on "^(From[   ]|(Old-|X-)?(Resent-)?(From|Reply-To|Sender):)(.*\\
<)?.*(sdf\.org|lastpass\.com|xmarks\.com).*"
procmail: Locking "/var/mail/zaxxon.lock"
procmail: Assigning "LASTFOLDER=/var/mail/zaxxon"
procmail: Opening "/var/mail/zaxxon"
procmail: Acquiring kernel-lock
procmail: Unlocking "/var/mail/zaxxon.lock"
From stephaniewilson@ambertuild.biz  Sun Jun 21 22:43:18 2015
 Subject: *****SPAM***** Is Alcohol Controling Your Life?
  Folder: /var/mail/zaxxon                               20780

The spam rule is

:0:
* ^Subject:.*[Ss][Pp][Aa][Mm].*
junkmail

Your question does not include any code, so we cannot tell what's wrong with your current recipes. What are the problems you are experiencing and what have you done to troubleshoot them? StackOverflow is not a free coding service, nor a troubleshooting service. Please update your question so that it provides enough information to have an intelligent conversation about your code. — tripleee, Jun 08 '15 at 03:06
Sounds like they changed the delivery mechanism so that Procmail is no longer being run, though. But without headers, this is mere speculation. — tripleee, Jun 08 '15 at 03:08
Several of my existing reciptes/code still work, such as my forwarding/saving email. And yes, I am guessing that the delivery mechanism is has changed, but how do I check that? — Zaxxon, Jun 09 '15 at 18:52
For a start, enable Procmail logging if you don't have it, and post a snippet of the resulting log. An interesting case would be a snippet where one action succeeds and another fails; but of course, I speculate that looking at the log will already tell you what's wrong if you hadn't done that before. If not, update the question to tell us *much* more about the set-up (which MTA, how does it invoke Procmail; maybe a suitable excerpt of headers from a delivered message). — tripleee, Jun 10 '15 at 06:03

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:29

procmail: Match on "< 256000"
procmail: Locking "spamassassin.lock"
procmail: Executing "spamassassin"
/bin/sh: Can't open spamassassin
procmail: Error while writing to "spamassassin"
procmail: Rescue of unfiltered data succeeded
procmail: Unlocking "spamassassin.lock"

This tells you that you have a rule which is pretty much exactly

:0fw:spamassassin.lock
* < 256000
| spamassassin

but there is no binary named spamassassin on the system where this recipe runs, so it fails.

The following "error writing to" is harder to diagnose, but might look something like

:0

which of course makes no sense.

The regex for the list headers appears to have a typo -- no legitimate emails will have headers with two adjacent colon characters. The value in the FROM= assignment should only have a single colon.

As a general stylistic remark, a trailing .* on a (non-capturing) regular expression is always redundant.

Diagnosing these problems without access to the faulty .procmailrc is challenging. If you still need help, definitely take care to include the actual code you are having problems with, as clearly described in the help section. Questions without the actual problematic code are likely to get downvoted and/or closed.

Intregrate existing Procmail with with new SpamAssassin

1 Answers1