Make sure you regularly run the spamassassin rule updater. The default ruleset, provided by spamassasin.org can be updated with this command:

sa-update

And then you need to restart spamassasin to load the new rules. We recommend you set this up as a cronjob.

If you want to use additional rule providers, here is an example using the main and a third party rule provider and also checking the GPG signatures on the updates to ensure they are legit:

sa-update --allowplugins --gpgkey D1C035168C1EBC08464946DA258CDB3ABDE9DC10 --channel saupdates.openprotect.com --channel updates.spamassassin.org

If you are missing GPG keys you will need to check with those projects for their keys (we do not run those projects). Here are some example commands that may work for you:

wget http://spamassassin.apache.org/updates/GPG.KEY
sa-update --import GPG.KEY

gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys BDE9DC10
sa-update --import pub.gpg

You can also check new rules to make sure they work by running this command:

spamassassin --lint

After running spamassassin --lint I get no reply, it just returns to the next line. Is this a good thing?

Franklyn

Yep, that means no errors.

A little more information on implementing openprotect.com SA rules update.

http://saupdates.openprotect.com/

For anyone interested in seeing what is going on behind the scenes and viewing the full output, try running