Updating Spamassassin on Plesk and FreeBSD is quite simple without breaking things since the Spamassassin on Plesk is pretty standard.
System: FreeBSD 6.x
Plesk Version: 8.0.x
May work with other versions.
The stock plesk Spamassassin is a 3.1.x variant, which gets pretty old pretty quick. You can upgrade this via the ports by passing a few variables to ‘make install’ to make sure that you
1) Back up /usr/psa/spamassassin so you have a backup in case something goes wrong:
tar -czf /usr/psa/spamassassin-backup.tar.gz /usr/psa/spamassassin
2) Install the new spamassassin from ports. Please check the prefix, and rules directories to make sure these are good. You can check these by grepping for RULES_DIR on the original plesk /usr/psa/spamassassin/bin/spamassassin file, that will tell you what directories you will want to use.
cd /usr/ports/mail/p5-SpamAssassin
All one line:
make install PREFIX=/usr/local/psa/spamassassin DEF_RULES_DIR=/usr/local/psa/spamassassin/share/spamassassin LOCAL_RULES_DIR=/usr/local/psa/spamassassin/etc/mail/spamassassin
Make sure you run spamassassin –lint to make sure that the rules you have installed are all error free.
/usr/local/psa/spamassassin/bin/spamassassin --lint
Restart spamassassin using:
/usr/local/psa/rc.d/psa-spamassassin restart
It should come back online and work, check the logs to make sure that it has. Send a few emails to make sure your new spamassassin is processing correctly, if so, sit back and enjoy another small plesk victory.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
