[Pkg-dspam-misc] My comments about version 3.6.2-1

[Michel Lespinasse]

Hey guys,

First of all happy new year and thanks for the experimental package!

I wanted to post my comments about version 3.6.2-1. Note that I'm a dspam
newbie so some of this may be trivial - however, you can expect that
some package users might be newbies too :)

I had an existing postfix-based MTA config and was trying to set up dspam
as a delivery agent. The instructions recommend to use the postfix
mailbox_command for changing the delivery agent, which has a larger scope
than I'd like - I would have preferred to start with just setting up one
test user before I do any system-wide changes. Anyway, I modified the
mailbox_command to make it use dspam as the delivery agent and had it break
for a few minutes before I realized that postfix runs the delivery agent
with the rights of the target user so I needed to uncomment the
UntrustedDeliveryAgent in dspam.conf (my bad, the postfix instructions
do mention I need that).

My second step was to figure out how to get my test user to opt in for
dspam filtering. I had RTFM and knew I needed to touch a file somewhere,
but the documentation never mentionned the correct location, so I had to
run strace (apparently it's /var/spool/dspam/opt-in/local/testuser.dspam).

Looking back at my difficulties in these first two steps, I believe it'd be
nicer if the instructions suggested that if you want dspam as a delivery
agent, you can use a .forward file instead of switching it at the
MTA level. For example, I could use
"|dspam --deliver=innocent --user testuser" (including the quotes) in
the .forward file for my test user - this makes it trivial to guarantee
I won't break email for the other users, and it also replaces the opt-in
mechanism in a more traditional unix way...

Also I did not quite understand why you can't pass extra arguments when
using an UntrustedDeliveryAgent - I'm used to passing -a $EXTENSION to
procmail as I'm using user+extension at domain form addresses.

My next step was to try and get the web frontend working. To make things
short - I did not get it working. I'm not using apache, and dont really
want to... I had to make sure the REMOTE_USER environment variable gets
set (boa can not do it, so I switched to thttpd which has basic
authentication support) and make /etc/dspam/webfrontend.conf readeable
by all (even after you authenticate, thttpd runs with www-data/www-data
user/group permissions). that brought me far enough to wander thru the
cgi menus, but then the cgi files did not have access rights into
/var/spoon/dspam, and I was not sure what would be a proper fix, so I
decided I'll just report and wait for the next version :)

I also noticed that graph.cgi depends on GD/Graph/lines3d.pm, which is
part of the libgd-graph3d-perl package. maybe a missing dependancy.

That's all I noticed. Hope this helps.

Cheers,

-- 
Michel "Walken" Lespinasse
"Bill Gates is a monocle and a Persian cat away from being the villain
in a James Bond movie." -- Dennis Miller