Sun Java System Messaging Server 6.3 Administration Guide

14.4.2 SpamAssassin/Messaging Server Theory of Operations

spamd is the daemon version of SpamAssassin and can be invoked from the MTA. spamd listens on a socket for requests and spawns a child process to test the message. The child process dies after processing the message and sending back a result. In theory, the forking should be an efficient process because the code itself is shared among the children processes.

The client portion, spamc from the SpamAssassin installation, is not used. Instead, its function is done by a shared library called libspamass.so, which is part of the Messaging Server. libspamass.so is loaded the same way that the Brightmail SDK is loaded.

From the MTA’s point of view, you can almost transparently switch between SpamAssassin and Brightmail for spam filtering. It’s not completely transparent, because they do not have the same functions. For example, Brightmail can also filter for viruses, but SpamAssassin is only used to filter for spam. The result, or verdict, returned by the two software packages is also different. SpamAssassin provides a score, while Brightmail provides just the verdict name, so the configuration would also have some differences.

When using SpamAssassin with the MTA, only a score and verdict is returned from SpamAssassin. The message itself is not modified. That is, options such as adding headers and modifying subject lines must be done by Sieve scripts. In addition, the mode option allows you to specify the string that is returned to indicate the verdict. The string choices are null, default, SpamAssassin result string, or a verdict string. See 14.4.7 SpamAssassin Options for details.