Description of problem: Spamassassin's effectivness is greatly enhanced by Razor checksum checking. If Red Hat could ship the razor libs with the spamassassin package, it would be A Good Thing. I understand the additional implication of the extra work and network activity that will result, but you could put "score RAZOR2_CHECK 0" in /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf. This would allow admins the choice to easily enable it without making the additional considerations of Razor the default behavior. I realize that we've missed this next release's deadlines, but the next next release would be a great time to implement this!
Along with extra server load, processing time, and bandwidth, razor also sends the full body of messages to the server for future processing. There may be concerns about privacy of this. https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=377 In any case perl-Razor-Agent is working well in fedora.us Extras and will probably be imported to the distribution in Fedora Extras for FC2. If you are using spamassassin on FC1 + updates, please give the fedora.us Extras perl-Razor-Agent a try. Keeping in MODIFIED state until Extras happens.
Spamassassin seems to catch less and less spam. How about including dspam instead?
I talked with spamassassin upstream about this issue. Here are a few answers: 1) spamassassin 3.0.0 coming soon is FAR better than the currently shipping 2.63. There is a snapshot currently in rawhide, and the 3.0.0 pre-release should be coming soon. 3.0.0 has URI blacklists enabled which adds a nice and very accurate spam bonus to mail. I personally use the rawhide spamassassin on my production mail server, and it was an easy upgrade from 2.63. 2) Later versions of spamassassin will investigate dspam's bayesian method in order to replace or augment its own. This should make spamassassin better in its bayesian capability, while retaining its many other tests. Otherwis, you are free to submit Fedora polished dspam packages to Fedora Extras.
Ok then... so how about including Spamassassin 3.0 and Razor in Fedora Core 3?
3.0 will already be in FC3. Razor will never be added to Core, however you can easily install it from Extras. It is called perl-Razor-Agent.