Back Up Your Spamassassin Settings!

[Jeff]

We discovered a new issue at the helpdesk this week related to SpamAssassin. Any change to a user's quotas has the unfortunate side effect of DELETING any custom filters that are setup in SpamAssassin. There is no technical reason for this to occur that we know of, but it happens nonetheless. We have reported it to the developers in order that this may be fixed in a future release, but there is no ETA for such a fix.

Therefore, Joe, Nick and the rest of the helpdesk staff are officially recommending that SpamAssassin power users create some kind of backup copy of any custom SpamAssassin settings to avoid their loss in the event your quotas are reset. The DirectAdmin backup tools will not backup SpamAssassin, as those settings reside outside of the directories which are included in a DA backup, so this would be a useful backup to perform regularly if you would like to avoid having to recreate them if they were deleted for circumstances within your control.

[edit]See thevillageinn's post below for a great tutorial on backing up these settings!

[thevillageinn]

I'll actually post something useful too.

Since the spamassassin settings reside in config files which are user accessible...backing up the configurations shouldn't be difficult at all. Particularly since DA now offers the ability to compress files on the clipboard.

To back up the spamassassin settings, simply log in to the DA user panel. Proceed to the file manager - at the top level of the file manager, there should be a configuration folder ".spamassassin" go into it, check the select checkbox to the right of all the files click the button at the bottom of the file listing "Add to Clipboard" then a little further down the page, add some meaningful text in the field that looks like this:
Compress clipboard files to /.spamassassin/____________.tar.gz

Hit the "Create" button. DA should go to work and you should end up with a compressed file which you can download to your local machine to have as a Spamassassin configuration backup.

I'm not sure whether the backup file should be deleted after downloading, but I did, in case there are a specific number of files that spamasssassin is looking for or is prepared to deal with in that folder.

[Jeff]

Thanks Dan, that is useful! Nick decided it was even worthy of inclusion in our FAQ. :)

http://hostpc.com/phpmyfaq/index.p?hp?acti...=68&artl?ang=en (http://hostpc.com/phpmyfaq/index.p?hp?action=artikel&cat=8&id=68&artl?ang=en)

Jeff