running spamass-milter as non-root and rejecting spam

[Saurabh Barve]

Hi,

1) I was running SpamAssassin as root, but I kept getting an error that 
said that it isn't a good idea to run SA as root. So, I created an 
unprivileged user `spamd` that had no login shell, and a home directory 
as /home/spamd. I then passed the following options to spamd when 
starting it up: -d -c -m5 --username spamd -H /home/spamd. SA now runs 
under user spamd. However, I get an error message that says that spamd 
cannot write to user preferences in /root/.spamassassin. I posted this 
question on the SA-list, and somebody told me that to get it to 
recognize the home directory for user prefs as /home/spamd, I need to 
run spamass-milter as a non-root user. How do I do that? There seems to 
be no option to run spamass-milter as an unprivileged user. `man 
spamass-milter` has one option for 'username', but it is not related to 
running the milter program as non-root. Since my unprivileged user does 
not have a shell, I cannot 'su' to that user to start spamass-milter.

2) I have the following options set up for spamass-milter: -r 10 -B 
address@hidden Thus, I am trying to reject any e-mail that gets a score of 
10 or more. All other e-mails that get tagged as spam, I want to be sent 
to address@hidden My score setting for spam recognition is set at 5. So, 
anything that is between 5 and 10 should be sent to address@hidden, and 
anything above 10 should be rejected outright[at least that's my 
understanding of it]. However, what I'm seeing is that messages with a 
score over 10 are attempted to be sent to address@hidden, and then are 
getting blocked as well. This is resulting in a mailer-daemon message 
being generated. The reason for the mailer-daemon is that the message is 
bouncing too many times between localhost and the mail server. My 
localhost is my mail server. How do I get around this?

Thanks in advance,
Saurabh.
--
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"Yours is to work. The results will take care of themselves"
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Saurabh Barve
address@hidden
(970)491-7714