I see that spamassassin 4.0 has been out for almost a year now, but (on my Almalinux box anyway) I see that it is running 3.4.
Has anyone upgraded to 4.0? Are there plans for it to be supported in Virtualmin?
I found upgrade instructions here:
Before I pull the trigger, I thought I’d post a note in the forums to see if others have experience with this, and/or if the powers that be are planning an upgrade.
Most core packages are pulled from the repo of your distribution. So it’s quite possible AlmaLinux 8.8 does not yet have SpamAssassin 4.0 in it’s repo.
Typically, this is for good reason, as upgrading from 3.x to 4.x could have some breaking changes that have not yet been vetted for the current version of AlmaLinux and could potentially cause problems without careful consideration.
That being said, most packages available from AlmaLinux are “backported” so that updates that affect stability and security within the current 3.x release branch are addressed without introducing “new features” which may be problematic.
Even so, you could definitely find a repo that has compiled a new version to work with your version of AlmaLinux, just be careful when doing so.
Thanks for that. I see 4.0 is available on fedora but not rhel. Probably not worth messing with.
One thing I was thinking was to run spamassassin 4 in a docker container and routing mail through it, but I’m not sure how hard it would be to configure postfix to send mail to the container and get it back again.
Also perhaps a lot of effort, but at least it would be reversible.
RHEL focuses on stability and security over new functionality. This is the model of most enterprise grade, long term support distros where having a secure and stable OS is more important then having the latest features.
Fedora’s life cycle is short lived with approx 6 months of support between releases, hence it offers more bleeding edge software but is supported for a short period.
In production I’d generally recommend RHEL over Fedora and for testing or hobbyist system or where you need bleeding edge and understanding the risks/rewards and how to deal with things Fedora or similar.
There’s no right or wrong answer as long as you know what you’re doing.
Spamassassin 4 is likely stable itself, but when considered by RHEL it may require some bleeding edge or untested versions of software that as a whole could make the OS less stable. You’ll likely see SA 4 added to the next major release as a result.
Well, upon further review… (as they say in the NFL) it looks like I had some duplications and other screwiness in my local.cf file, so most of the problems I was having were simply my own damn fault.
Now that things are tightened up, the false positives and negatives have dropped a lot.
I’m sure 4.0 has some new nifty features, but if it ain’t broke, or in my case is no longer broke, it’s probably best not to fix it.