This short howto is written and done on Windows 2003 Server and Exchange 2003 Server.
Because lately I (among other users) have begun to receive large number of spam on e-mail server of the company where I work, I have decided to implement SpamAssassin which is primary made for Linux.
I have searched little bit on the net how to do it and found ESA Sink written by Christopher G. Lewis. It works on the principle that SpamAssasin is working in serial mode (it scans one message at a time) and ESA Sink take incoming message from Exchange, outputs it to file, run that file through SpamAssasin and returns it to Exchange if it is OK.
Installation and configuration of everything is not that much complicated. It can be divided in following steps:
- Download and install the latest version of Active Perl from Active State
- Download NMake from Microsoft and after extracting move files to c:\perl\bin
- Download ESA Sink from Chris’s site
- After installation of ESA Sink you will get ExchangeSpamassassin.ini file opened
- Check config file values, change if necessary, I have changed MaxMsgSizeKB from -1 to 2048 = 2MB and leave it opened for later as well as installation
- Now start command prompt, Start->Run->Cmd and enter ppm to start Perl Package Manager
- If you receive message that ppm is not recognizable type set path=%path%;c:\perl\bin\ and then ppm
- Now in PPM press Ctrl+1 to see list of available perl modules for installation
- Type Net-Dns in search field and when you get this package in list click with right mouse button on it and select install
- Now we will do same thing for IO-Socket-INET6, IP-Country and Mail-SPF
- Now press Ctrl+Enter to install these packages and when it is done you can close PPM
- Download the latest version of SpamAssassin and unzip it to c:\Mail-SpamAssassin-3.2.5 (3.2.5=current version that you are downloading, in my case 3.2.5)
- In the command prompt now type cd c:\Mail-SpamAssassin-3.2.5
- Type following command: perl makefile.pl and answer questions before compiling
- Now we need to run nmake, so just type nmake /i (/i means that we want nmake to compile application ignoring errors)
- After compiling we need to run nmake /i install to install compiled files
- Unset read-only attribute from c:\perl\site\bin\spamassassin.bat file
- Now to test SpamAssassin we will enter in command prompt to directory C:\Mail-SpamAssassin-3.2.5\t\data\spam and execute command spamassassin -D < 001
- If you see lot of text on your command prompt it means that SpamAssassin works like it should and on the end of output you should find scoring for content of file 001
- Now we will return to .ini file from ESA setup and change line SpamAssassin_Batch_File to points to the location of our spamassassin.bat file which is c:\perl\site\bin\spamassassin.bat
- Save and close file and finish the ESA installation
- At the end of the installation you will leave checkbox to run ESA install script and click Finish button
- Small command prompt window will come and leave as soon as ESA is installed
- Now to see if it is working properly you can check C:\ESA\Ham or C:\ESA\Spam directories for files and you can send e-mail to yourself as well, if everything works you should find SpamAssassin information in header of the e-mail
- To be sure that you don’t have any errors you can check C:\ESA\Log directory in which you should find log file with errors
This configuration works OK on servers that don’t receive more than 1500-2000 e-mail per day, but I wouldn’t recommend it for higher number of e-mails without very strong machine, because in this configuration SpamAssassin works in serial mode, it process one object at a time and this includes downloading of e-mail to file, control against filters, control against URBL lists and then if everything is ok returning it to server for delivery.
For me it was simple test to see if it will work for us, it didn’t worked because of large number of e-mails that we receive (10 000+ per day) so I will go on solution to create Linux SpamAssassin gateway.
Note: I would recomend creating of small .bat script that will delete .out files older than 7 days to avoid running out of disk on your system disk
Hi Amar,
Thanks for the *very* comprehensive write-up on SpamAssassin for Windows.
I am trying to get SpamAssassin working on an SBS2003 server.
I have followed the instructions of David Stephens at:
http://www.davidstephens.co.uk/category/windows/
However, he makes no mention of installing ActivePerl, or compilation.
My SpamAssassin does appear to be partly working, but I am getting errors in the logs such as:
10/16/2011 12:01:35 AM: SpamAssassin: C:\ESA\SPAMC-SPAMD.BAT -d 127.0.0.1 -u spamd “C:\ESA\NEW\msg111016000135_95EEA.out”
10/16/2011 12:01:35 AM: SpamAssassin result: 64
10/16/2011 12:01:35 AM: Checking for PERL in Path…
10/16/2011 12:01:35 AM: *** ERROR – OUT File is blank: C:\ESA\NEW\msg111016000135_95EEA.out
10/16/2011 12:01:35 AM: *** ERROR – Logging Major Error: ’32′. Err: 53 – OUT File is blank
However, I note that there is at least one spam message in C:\ESA\Spam:
msg111016164107_D7C10.out
Inspection shows it to be spam.
Where am I going wrong? I apologise for bothering you, as you must be very busy.
Any help greatfully received.
Yours sincerely,
John Langley.
Hi John,
I didn’t try to set it up on Windows so I’m not of big help there but I would try to run it with -v (verbose) to see what does it say and on what part of system is it complaining.
Also check if you can set it somehow to create debug log, usually there are several types of logging, informational, warn, debug, etc. where debug is the one that gives the most informations about everything.
Try something like this and let me know if I can “help” you more.
Kind regards
Amar