[TriLUG] SpamAssassin as a daemon

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Aaron S. Joyner wrote:

> Rick DeNatale wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 2004-07-16 at 09:44 -0400, Jeremy Portzer wrote:
>>
>>  
>>
>>> So, the developers invented the spamc/spamd combination.  In order to
>>> reduce the processing time for each message, much of the spamassassin
>>> code is kept loaded in memory at all times, through the spamd 
>>> binary. Then, the spamc binary is the "client" used to connect to 
>>> spamd.  But
>>> this isn't a daemon like httpd or ftp that provides services to other
>>> computers on your network, it's simply an internal thing that makes
>>> spamassassin run better.   
>>
>>
>> Well, actually spamd is a daemon pretty much like httpd or xinetd. It
>> listens for requests via a socket, by default on port 783. Out of the
>> box it only allows requests from localhost, but it's perfectly happy to
>> serve spamc either on your computer or another, as long as you tell it
>> to allow access from those ip addresses using the option -allowed-ips.
>> The default for spamc is to connect to spamd on localhost, but by using
>> the -d option you can point it to spamd running somewhere else.
>>  
>>
> How do Joseph or your wife (Jason) feel about being sponsors?  I'd 
> feel more comfortable with it being a steering committee member, or at 
> least a long standing member, who is the sponsor.
>
> Others thoughts?
>
> Aaron J.

Okay, so either Mozilla or I made quite an error.  I don't know how it 
worked out this way, but clearly I also wasn't paying much attention 
either, while eating dinner and responding to email at the same time.  :)

Please feel free to ignore the previous message if you're not on the 
steering committee.  :)

While I'm responding to this email (inadvertantly) - I think what Jeremy 
was attempting to say it that Spamassassin isn't typicaly run as a 
stand-alone service.  Unlike say, Apache, there's not much point in 
running SA on your machine by itself.  Yes, it can be used as you 
described, and is quite well suited to high-traffic environments in that 
fashion.  But it does differ from the other daemons mentioned in that it 
provides a function which is most commonly used as a supporting service, 
to other more "customer facing" services.  I suppose to be more clear, 
spamc is different in that it's not intended to be connected to by "end 
users" in any direct fashion.

Aaron J.