I have no idea whether the Web GUI will properly interact with the new installation because I never use it anyway. Spamassassin is one of those things that I’m in the habit of doing from the shell. But it does at least recognize it.
I spent some time clicking around in the GUI, and everything seems to work. At least everything I manually entered into the configuration is still there.
Maybe I should start using the GUI. It’s pretty nicely-done.
Operating system CentOS Linux 7.9.2009 Webmin version 1.973 Usermin version 1.823 Virtualmin version 6.15 Authentic theme version 19.73
Is this manual updating of spamassassin a requirement following these error messages I’ve been receiving by email:
channel: no ‘mirrors.sought.rules.yerp.org’ record found, channel failed
16-Mar-2021 04:52:37: SpamAssassin: Update available, but download or extract failed
It’s a distro issue, not a panel issue. CentOS 7 repos don’t provide a current SpamAssassin version, and
"On March 1, 2020, we will stop publishing rulesets with SHA-1 checksums. If you do not update to 3.4.2 or later, you will be stuck at the last ruleset with SHA-1 checksums.
I’ve just seen that the issue has recently been raised at Red Hat Bugzilla. A change is under consideration for RHEL8, I may wait to see if RHEL7/CentOS 7 gets similar.
I get the importance of stability; but when something simply doesn’t work anymore, not updating it for the sake of stability is kind of stupid and self-defeating.
One thing panel maintainers might be able to do (and I don’t know because I haven’t tried it) is repackage the rulesets for the older versions. But it really shouldn’t be necessary, probably is inadvisable, and may not even be legal to do that.
So, it appears that although the issue with spamassassin not updating due to the use of an outdated mirror is fixed in RHEL 8, it will not be fixed in RHEL 7.
There was a new release of Spamassassin on 2021-03-24, v3.4.5 and as such some of the commands given in the OP are no longer valid. Revised commands for this new release are: