Bug 1094837

Description of problem:

The spampd service is started as root by default. The privilege drop to the spampd user/group is left to spampd, which doesn't actually drop privileges before completely initializing all SpamAssassin rule sets, thereby running an enormous amount of perl code from different sources as root.

There is no apparent reason for this, as there are no privileges required for reading the configuration and no privileged port is used either.

Systemd can take care of setting the right user, and should always be used as long as there is no good reason to do otherwise.

The fix is to simply add these two lines to the [Service] section of the spampd unit file, located at /usr/lib/systemd/system/spampd:

User=spampd
Group=spampd

The spampd binary is currently started with the "--u=spampd --g=spampd" options, which can be safely removed after adding the abovementioned lines, but this does cause spampd to try and become uid and gid 12 (mail), resulting in two ugly log lines:

spampd[31243]: Setting gid to "12 12"
spampd[31243]: Couldn't become gid "12": Bewerking niet toegestaan

So my humble advice is to just leave the "--u=spampd --g=spampd" options in there, so the log stays clean (that will prevent spampd from trying to change its uid).