Hi I am using Virtualmin 4.07.gpl GPL / Webmin 1.680 with CentOS.
I know SpamAssassin did a major update back in February and I believe they are no longer updating databases for old versions. The current SpamAssassin is 3.4.0.
But in my Virtualmin package updates, it shows Running latest 3.3.1-3.el6 There is no update.
Does that just mean there is a delay to get an update suitable for Virtualmin? Do others users update another way?
I'm still fairly inexperienced with Linux and don't want to break my install, but am willing to learn if someone can point me in the right direction.
Thanks for the help!
Howdy,
You actually have the most recent SpamAssassin package available to your distro.
When a distribution ships, it ships with a set of package versions -- and those versions don't typically change over the lifetime of that distribution.
What they do to provide stability is to backport bugfixes and security fixes into the software versions they shipped.
Our recommendation would be to continue using the SpamAssassin version provided with your distribution... or if you really needed a newer version, to look into a distribution that includes a newer version.
-Eric
Thanks for the info Eric! That explains a lot. I guess I have to upgrade my distro. I'm sure a lot of the guys here run webservers, so maybe I'm missing something with spam prevention. But it has been a struggle for the last 2 years that seems to get worse daily. The new features (and database updates) for SpamAssassin seem like a necessity for me.
I can't find any info at SpamAssassin's website about minimum distro requirements, but I assume I can just get the latest CentOS and I would be good. (Sorry, I know this isn't the place to ask that question)
Howdy,
You're quite welcome to ask SpamAssassin and distros in the Forums here. It's certainly relevant, and other users may benefit from it as well.
The trouble though is that I suspect you are using the most recent CentOS version... CentOS 6.x would be providing the same SpamAssassin version. CentOS won't provide a more recent SpamAssassin version until CentOS 7 comes out.
To my knowledge, the only distro providing SpamAssassin 3.4.0 is Ubuntu 14.04 which just came out a couple of weeks ago (which Virtualmin will be supporting very shortly).
There are third party software repositories which do provide a more recent SpamAssassin for your distro/version... and while that's not something we recommend, if it's important to you to try out that newer version, you could always look into one of those third party versions.
The way we'd suggest going about that would be to only install the one package, we don't recommend enabling the entire third party repository for your server. We would also recommend testing that it doesn't cause any problems on a test system, before installing that to your live server.
-Eric