Installing Mailscanner ClamAv and Spamassassin

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Intro

In this article we will see how to install a basic system to avoid your system to spread spam, virus and any type of crap to your users.

Since it is what we use, the machine which we are speaking about is a CentOS 4.0 with BlueQuartz control panel, to be honest, the one provided by Nuonce.net.

The installation procedure has been tested several times on different servers, and everything went OK.

The software we installed is MailScanner 4.56 , Spamassassin version 3.1.7 on Perl 5.8.5,  ClamAV 0.90RC1.1

First steps

Well, let's go on!

To be nice we will download the packages in a brand new directory, let's call it "installation_dir" so that you will always be able to track down the installation process.

Log in to your machine and become root with su command.

Then type the following:

MailScanner

Locate the MailScanner package, go to MailScanner site and grab the stable release.

Then untar it and install the software with the install script provided with the package:

Everything should be ok, let's make some changes to the init scripts:

If you run

you should see some mailscanner-related lines of logs

ClamAv

This is the antivirus part of the job. Locate the last package of clamav from the official site, then:

To test if everything is ok type

You  should see something like this:

Now we configure the signature download process:

Here locate the UpdateLogFile directive and uncomment it out. It must look like:

Now we create the freshclam.log file, setting the right permissions

By now it is possible to run

SpamAssassin

To install SpamAssassin there are two ways:

1) install it by compiling the tar.gz you can obtain on the official site
2) install it using CPAN

Actually we prefer the second way.. is very easy!

Let's log to CPAN by typing:

If it's the first type you run CPAN the system will ask you a lot of informations... Follow the instructions on screen.  When you get the CPAN prompt ( cpan> ) type:

And finally....

Then restart sendmail:

Vipul's Razor

Now that we have SpamAssassin installed, we can provide to it some additional software, suc as Vipul's Razor. Locate the two tars and download them into the installation dir:

Then uncompress and install:

Now that Razor is installed we must run three utilities to make it working:

Pyzor

To install Pyzor locate the tar with the latest version and download it:

then uncompress it and proceed to install:

run the next command to complete pyzor installation

DCC

This is the last step, locate DCC and download it:

uncompress it, compile and install it:

We must now edit the following enabling DCC:

Locate the line

and uncomment it

Save the file and that's done

How to test the installation

To test SpamAssassin installation you can copy a complete message into a file on the server:

Here place a whole message. Test the installation by typing the following: