FETCHMAIL vs GETMAIL oddity

[phoenix]

I've been trying to use GETMAIL instead of FETCHMAIL to retrieve mail from several ISP account, I managed to do this and with GETMAIL I used the external MDA option with sendmail to pass it to Zimbra.

I sent a test mail to an account and retrieved it first with GETMAIL and left a copy on the server, I then used FETCHMAIL to retrieve and delete the mail. When I checked the headers I noticed that the spam scores were different for these messages.

This is the GETMAIL test:

User-Agent: SquirrelMail/1.4.2
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-Priority: 3
Importance: Normal
X-DSPAM-Result: Innocent
X-DSPAM-Processed: Thu Apr 20 13:30:47 2006
X-DSPAM-Confidence: 0.9996
X-DSPAM-Probability: 0.0000
X-DSPAM-Signature: 44477ef6298291994167059
X-DSPAM-Factors: 27,
X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at 
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.247 tagged_above=-10 required=5 autolearn=no
 tests=[AWL=0.356, BAYES_00=-2.599, DSPAM_HAM=-0.1, FORGED_RCVD_HELO=0.135,
 NO_REAL_NAME=0.961]
X-Spam-Score: -1.247
X-Spam-Level:

and this is the FETCHMAIL test:

User-Agent: SquirrelMail/1.4.2
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-Priority: 3
Importance: Normal
X-DSPAM-Result: Innocent
X-DSPAM-Processed: Thu Apr 20 13:32:23 2006
X-DSPAM-Confidence: 0.9996
X-DSPAM-Probability: 0.0000
X-DSPAM-Signature: 44477f57309891091686056
X-DSPAM-Factors: 27,
X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at 
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.554 tagged_above=-10 required=5 autolearn=no
 tests=[AWL=-0.440, BAYES_05=-1.11, DSPAM_HAM=-0.1, FORGED_RCVD_HELO=0.135,
 NO_REAL_NAME=0.961]
X-Spam-Score: -0.554
X-Spam-Level:

They were both delivered to the same single mailbox and they have been through slightly different tests in Spamassassin and received slightly different scores despite being the same message. Needless to say I've tried this several times with the same results.

Does anyone have any ideas (or guess) as to why they're different and, more importantly, does it matter? Could it be caused by where/how sendmail and fetchmail inject their mail into Zimbra? I thought they both used port 25.

Could this be caused by the headers in the mail as they appear in a slightly different order to each other?

As you can imagine I'm slightly confused by those results.

[KevinH]

You'll see the test produce the exact same result except for these two:

AWL=0.356, BAYES_00=-2.599

vs

AWL=-0.440, BAYES_05=-1.11

The first is the auto-white list - http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/AutoWhitelist

You can read from the wiki that it will vary over time and try to push the score in the direction of it's most recent scores. So that guy is just trying adjust for the difference in the BAYES_X scores. The Bayes tests will vary by the headers as Bayes tokenizes everything. You can read more here:

http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/BayesFaq


The bottom line is it's no big deal since both messages are clearly good mail and they result is such. What your seeing is just a little fluctuation in SA and this is expected and why there are so many tests ran on each message before something is declared as spam or not.

[phoenix]

Thanks for that reassurance. I did go through the wiki but I still wasn't sure if it actually meant there was a problem.

[nadia007]

I'd love to learn how you got getmail to work with zimbra!! If you could post some steps I would appreciate it!!

Nadia

[phoenix]

I'd love to learn how you got getmail to work with zimbra!! If you could post some steps I would appreciate it!!

It should be failry simple to set-up as it is very similar to fetchmail. I'm afraid that I didn't continue using getmail after that test and I went back to fetchmail.

[nadia007]

Phoenix;

I've read some of the guides for fetchmail and getmail, but they both mention something about maildir and mbox. I'm not sure which one to use or which one would be compatible with Zimbra. Which one should I use?

Nadia

[phoenix]

You don't use either of those, fetchmail will getmail from a remote server and deliver it to port 25 on the local server (I assume you're running fetchmail on the zimbra box?). Try installing webmin fro www.webmin.com, it has a fetchmail config panel - you can do it easilly from that.

[nadia007]

Phoenix;

Thx, I'll look at webmin. I've heard that getmail is better than fetchmail. I'll do more reading and see how I can make them play nice!

nadia

[phoenix]

No, fetchmail is the better product with more features but getmail is clsoe to that goal. For what you're doing then fetchmail is fine and getmail won't offer any extra functionality, if fetchmail comes with your system then I'd use that.

[nadia007]

Phoenix;

Wow... sure makes administering your server a lot nicer!! Thx for the webmin tip! I did find the section that allows you to configure your fetchmail. I think I put everything in there correctly. Unfortunately I do get an error when I try to test the server:

fetchmail: socket error while fetching from username@mydomain.com@PeoplePC

What am I doing wrong? I've looked this error up on the net and I don't really get a straight answer. Sounds like it could be a million things! I'll keep tinkering with it and see if I'm able to figure it out!

Nadia