Psuedo Guru Blog by a wannabe guru with spelling issues.

Postfix, Spamassassin, and Permissions

I recently setup SpamAssassin to work with Postfix, or so I thought. Looking at the log files, I saw the following entries:

info: setuid to nobody succeeded
Creating default_prefs [//.spamassassin/user_prefs]
Cannot write to //.spamassassin/user_prefs: No such file or directory
Couldn't create readable default_prefs for [//.spamassassin/user_prefs]

Ah, SpamAssassin wanted to write something, but I had set it up to run as "nobody", with no permissions. Oh well, I guess it's time to toss SpamAssassin a bone. Since nobody had / as it's home directory, and I didn't want to muck with that right now, I just did the following:

cd /
mkdir .spamassassin
chown .spamassassin nobody

That did the trick. No more errors, and SpamAssassin was able to create its prefs in its own little sandbox.

Search all Major Blacklists

I setup an SMTP server on a new machine last week, and everything seemed to be going fine until mail bounced from an Earthlink recipient. After much testing and log file digging, I found out that my IP address was listed in the SORBS database, which Earthlink seems to use for spam blocking. From what I could gather, my IP at some point in the past had belonged to a machine that was temporarily hijacked by a virus or trojan horse, and for that it earned a permament place on the SORBS list.

Here is a hint for dealing with SORBS. Do not bother with the automated delisting system. It is pretty much useless. Just register with SORBS, then you can log a support case to have your IP address cleared. Mine was cleared in under 24 hours once they rescanned the IP, discovered it now belonged to a new domain, and the server was secure. Also, make sure you use Firefox when navigating their interface. IE did not work well at all.

So, now about the title of this post..."Search all Major Blacklists". I found the following tool extremely useful for hunting down blacklist entries. It searches all the major blacklists and shows you which, if any, your IP address is listed in. I've now got it bookmarked.

DNSStuff Spam Database Lookup