Spamassassin updates

If you’re running Spamassassin on Debian or Ubuntu, have you enabled automatic rule updates? If not, why not? If possible, you should enable this feature. It should be as simple as setting "CRON=1" in /etc/default/spamassassin. If you choose not to enable this feature, I’d really like to hear why. In particular, I’m thinking about changing the default behavior of the Spamassassin packages such that automatic rule updates are enabled, and I’d like to know if (and why) anybody opposes this.

Spamassassin hasn’t been providing rules as part of the upstream package for some time. In Debian, we include a snapshot of the ruleset from an essentially arbitrary point in time in our packages. We do this so Spamassassin will work “out of the box” on Debian systems. People who install spamassassin from source must download rules using spamassassin’s updates channel. The typical way to use this service is to use cron or something similar to periodically check for rule changes via this service. This allows the anti-spam community to quickly adapt to changes in spammer tactics, and for you to actually benefit from their work by taking advantage of their newer, presumably more accurate, rules. It also allows for quick reaction to issues such as the one described in bug 738872 and 774768.

If we do change the default, there are a couple of possible approaches we could take. The simplest would be to simply change the default value of the CRON variable in /etc/default/spamassassin. Perhaps a cleaner approach would be to provide a “spamassassin-autoupdates” package that would simply provide the cron job and a simple wrapper program to perform the updates. The Spamassassin package would then specify a Recommends relationship with this package, thus providing the default enabled behavior while still providing a clear and simple mechanism to disable it.