SpamAssassin is one of the most-used spam filtering systems in use today. Unfortunately, because there are so many different ways SpamAssassin can be used, SpamAssassin remains subject to many performance problems. Fortunately, there are several speed-ups and optimizations that can be applied to most SpamAssassin installations to speed up its rule processing, especially on Debian and Ubuntu GNU/Linux-based systems. These instructions can be adopted to other operating systems as well.

This article does not discuss configuring your mail filtering system (i.e. procmail, maildrop). This depends completely on your setup, and more than likely there are plenty of other articles that describe the best way to setup what you want.

Find packages that contain a file

apt-file search "somefile"

List all installed packages

% apt-cache pkgnames
% dpkg -l

List files owned by package

% dpkg -L pkg

What package owns a file

% dpkg -S /path/to/file

Display package information

% dpkg -p pkg

I can never remember how to install Java on Debian, so here's my version on how to do it the Debian Way (TM).

Download the Sun Java 2 Runtime environment or Development Kit from Sun's Java site. The file you download should have a ".bin" extension. Then install:

java-package is a set of Debian scripts for creating your own Debian-ized Java package. fakeroot lets you run certain programs as root, such as the Debian package creation process. After these are installed, run:

The first creates a Debian package from the Sun binary installer, while the second installs the created Debian package.

This will fulfill all Java dependencies in Debian, something you would not get if you installed Java via some other method. It's also the "official" Java, as opposed to using something like Blackdown, and makes you less reliant on having to rely on other people for packaging. For example, I used this to create my own AMD64 64-bit Java package.

Since e-mail aliases are basically free (it's a line in a text file), I've started the habit of creating new e-mail aliases for what I think have a "high-risk" of getting harvested by spammers.

I created one for Debian's mailing lists a week ago, and today I received my first spam e-mail to that address. It was an eBay phishing scheme.

Debian's public mailing list archives make no attempt at address obfuscation--any web crawler is free to come and take as many valid e-mail addresses as they want. My attempts at complaining about this appear to have fallen on dead ears--no one appears to care.

At least it's nice to definitely know where your spam is coming from.

At the moment, there are only two semi up-to-date x86-64 (that is, for Athlon-64, Intel EMT64, and Opteron) Debian-based live CDs.

• Knoppix-64, based on Knoppix 3.4 (somewhat out of date as Knoppix 4.0 is out)
• Ubuntu, which is kept up to date and is available tucked away on their FTP site

I'm getting Ubuntu now to try out on my new workstation.