Spamassassin Error: cannot create user preferences file //.spamassassin/user_prefs: Permission denied on VestaCP - CentOS
How to fix an Spamassasin Error on a VestaCP
When you configure spamassassin on VestaCP (CentOS) sometimes you might have some problems with the autolearn feature and also with the bayes plugin of spamassassin.
The error looks like:
more /var/log/maillog
Apr 5 00:31:00 vestaserver01 spamd[1353]: spamd: connection from localhost [127.0.0.1] at port 37022
Apr 5 00:31:00 vestaserver01 spamd[1353]: spamd: setuid to nobody succeeded
Apr 5 00:31:00 vestaserver01 spamd[1353]: spamd: creating default_prefs: //.spamassassin/user_prefs
Apr 5 00:31:00 vestaserver01 spamd[1353]: config: cannot create user preferences file //.spamassassin/user_prefs: No such file or directory
Apr 5 00:31:00 vestaserver01 spamd[1353]: spamd: failed to create readable default_prefs: //.spamassassin/user_prefs
Apr 5 00:31:00 vestaserver01 spamd[1353]: spamd: checking message <[email protected]> for nobody:99
Apr 5 00:31:00 vestaserver01 spamd[1353]: plugin: eval failed: bayes: (in learn) locker: safe_lock: cannot create tmp lockfile
/.spamassassin/bayes.lock.vestaserver01.example.com.1353 for /.spamassassin/bayes.lock: No such file or directory
Apr 5 00:31:00 vestaserver01 spamd[1353]: spamd: clean message (-1.0/5.0) for nobody:99 in 0.2 seconds, 3138 bytes.
Apr 5 00:31:00 vestaserver01 spamd[1353]: spamd: result: . 0 - ALL_TRUSTED,HTML_MESSAGE scantime=0.2,size=3138,user=nobody,uid=999,required_score=5.0,rhost=localhost,raddr=127.0.0.1,rport=37022,mid=<[email protected]>,autolearn=unavailable
Basically the error are the permissions on: //.spamassassin/user_prefs
To fix it follow the next steps:
Create the user spamd, in order to avoid to run spamassassin with the user nobody:
groupadd -g 1001 spamd useradd -u 1001 -g spamd -s /sbin/nologin -d /var/lib/spamassassin spamd mkdir /var/lib/spamassassin chown spamd:spamd /var/lib/spamassassin</pre>Edit the file /etc/exim/exim.conf.
vi /etc/exim/exim.confChange the line:
spam = nobody:true/defer_okto
spam = spamd:true/defer_okRestart exim an spamassassin
/etc/init.d/exim restart /etc/init.d/spamassassin restartAfter that verify that the files bayes_seen, bayes_toks and user_prefs exists on the spamd home (In this case /var/lib/spamassassin)
pwd /var/lib/spamassassin ls -la total 40 drwxr-xr-x 3 spamd spamd 4096 Apr 7 17:58 . drwxr-xr-x 36 root root 4096 Feb 25 00:56 .. -rw------- 1 spamd spamd 12288 Apr 2 21:34 bayes_seen -rw------- 1 spamd spamd 12288 Apr 2 17:34 bayes_toks -rw-r--r-- 1 spamd spamd 1869 Apr 1 17:18 user_prefs
Done!
Luis Cacho
Senior Container Infrastructure Consultant
Senior Container Infrastructure Consultant at Red Hat | DevOps Practitioner | Kubernetes Enthusiast | Ansible Ninja | Data Science Noob