Advices about Spam Assassin ?

[ParrillaDeJuan]

Hi guys,
Spam Assassin, i'm happy with it, great software. Though, even its 3.0.x daemon
incarnation - spamd - is memory hungry: at startup it takes roughly 20Mb of memory,
spawning just one child (configured so); some 30Mb of memory are persistently eaten
even with very small traffic rates (say, 500 email/day). Do you have any experience to
share about it ?
I was wondering whether it's either matter of a configuration nit, an issue with the 3.0.x
version or a trouble with the Debian package. Further, do you have any (free/OSS/etc.)
alternative software to recommend basing on your experience ?

[tfolk]

You can save a lot of resources by not running SA as a daemon. I just followed the directions at:
http://rimuhosting.com/howto/memory.jsp

[FuguTabetai]

I found that when I'm getting say 1000 to 2000 spam emails a day, running SpamAssasin was just too much for my low-end VPS here. Since almost all the spam was going to catch-all addresses on my domains, I set up a rule in postfix to deliver catch-all email to an alias that shoots the mail over to my gmail account. So now gmail is getting the few thousand spam emails a day, which I'm sure they can handle. Mail to my non-catchall accounts has been fine, although if it starts getting spamming I would re-enable SpamAssassin if I can figure out how to do that after the catch-all mail is sent off to gmail (shouldn't be too hard, just some logic in the shell script that does the invocation.)

For my purposes, this has worked really well, and removed what was a heavy load from my system.

[retep]

FWIW http://rimuhosting.com/howto/memory.jsp actually _does_ recommend you run it as a daemon. Just that the daemon only run one checker thread and that procmail only process one request at a time.

I just finished fixing a vps where that wasn't the case. Where procmail was kicking off a spamassassin process everytime it got an email. When multiple emails arrived at once this starts up perl and causes lots of IO, slowing down the rate at which spamassassin can run, so more emails arrive and more spamassassin processes run, which uses more memory, which causes more swap, which slows things down even more, which... Anyway, its not pretty.

For spamassassin I'd say you need at least a 128MB VPS. More if your budget extends to it.

[vanvh]

I found Spamassasin (Iwas using Mimedefang) was too much of a memory hog for my 128mb VPS.
I have since been using 3rd party email filtering (Netriplex).
Still keen to find a way to filter without paying, and someone recently has pointed me to using the following:

Postfix with - SQLgrey (http://sqlgrey.sourceforge.net/)
+ Mailscanner (http://www.mailscanner.info/)

Mailscanner looks interesting, but SQLgrey looks like it should stop most of the junk, without having to run SA. I'm not really a linux guru and haven't been able to get it up and running yet, so wondering if anyone has tried this with the RimuHosting RHEL?

regards, vanvh