spamdb

spamdb is a solution to manage user feedback for a SpamAssassin Bayes database in a distributed environment.

The expected scenario sees a number of SpamAssassin instances on different servers, and a single centralized spamdb service. The spamdb service maintains the authoritative copy of the Bayes database, receives feedback submissions, and periodically pushes an updated snapshot of the database to the servers running SpamAssassin.

Feedback submission is usually integrated into the IMAP server (e.g. Dovecot). As it normally runs inline to the IMAP COPY command, latency is important here: the spamdb submission mechanism sees the feedback tool send requests to a local relay daemon running on the host via UNIX socket; the relay server than takes care of forwarding the request to the spamdb submission service over the network.

The design tolerates unavailability by discarding requests, accepting that each invidivual feedback request only contributes a small amount of data to the database.

Building

The main spamdb program can be built with this command:

$ go build -o spamdb .

While the spamdb-feedback tool must be compiled separately from its C source:

$ gcc -o spamdb-feedback -O2 -s c/submit.c

Running

The spamdb tool supports a few commands to run the feedback server, the relay server, and the client. Server commands require a configuration file (in YAML) to specify network transport parameters and URLs.

spamdb server

Runs the server. Specify the paths