I'm running stable (sarge) on my mailserver, and until recently I was running the sarge release of spamassassin - 3.0.3. If you're only tracking stable then you probably won't see an upgrade until the end of 2006.

A year is a long time in spam scanning patterns - so I decided to update. The debian-volatile Project provide package updates where data-files (rather than software) require updating within the useful life of the software - for example, anti-virus definitions or calendar data. They're currently distributing SpamAssassin 3.1.0a for sarge

SpamAssassin rules should be the perfect match for debian-volatile. Unfortunately the upgrade for spamassassin is more than just a few extra patterns, and an unattended upgrade would probably be unwise. Therefore it's being distributed with the unfortunate sounding name of "sloppy".

Here's the simple process I went through to upgrade to the sloppy spamassassin.

Firstly, check the mirror list for a suitable server. ftp.uk.debian.org has a directory available, but it's not apparently synced up, so I'm using another in /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian-volatile sarge/volatile main contrib
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian-volatile sarge/volatile-sloppy main

Then attempt to download the software using the "-t" argument in order to specify sarge-sloppy as the release name. Other dependent pages may be pulled down, but these will come, if possible, from your normal sarge source.

sudo apt-get -t sarge-sloppy -d install spamassassin

I stopped my mailer-daemon at this point as a precautionary measure before installing the new package.

sudo /etc/init.d/exim4 stop
sudo apt-get -t sarge-sloppy install spamassassin

You get asked about replacing a couple of the files under /etc. Mostly it should be fine to keep your existing configs (especially if you haven't done much tweaking). One change I needed to make was to disable the Pyzor plugin, which is available on the system, but not for use in spamassassin. Previously this was the entry "use_pyzor 0" in /etc/spamassassin/local.cf, but is now commenting out the entry in /etc/spamassassin/v310.pre.

Then restart spamd and your mailer-daemon

sudo /etc/init.d/spamassassin start
sudo /etc/init.d/exim4 start

Everything seems to be fine. While ham seems to have the same scores as before, spam seems generally higher - but I'll be monitoring it over the next week. One thing I did need to do was create a new logcheck entry in /etc/logcheck.d/ignore.d.server/local-spamassassin to prevent long lists of checks being mailed to root periodically.

^\w{3} [ :0-9]{11} [._[:alnum:]-]+ spamd\[[0-9]+\]:( spamd:)? (checking|processing) message .+ for [._[:alnum:]-]+:[0-9]+\.? *$

Update: "sloppy" doesn't pull in 3.1.4, so in order to get the newest version I now have the following in sources:

deb http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/volatile.debian.net sarge-proposed-updates/volatile main contrib
deb http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/volatile.debian.net sarge/volatile main contrib
deb http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/volatile.debian.net sarge/volatile-sloppy main contrib