I'm trying to use SpamAssassin on my CentOS system. I installed the program and the plugin for Claws-mail from the repository, and reconfigured Claws to use it. Then I used sa-learn to get rules generated, using hundreds of spam and ham files.

When I get mail, a pop-up tells me that SpamAssassin cannot filter mail, perhaps because it cannot find spamd. Then it spends several minutes allegedly filtering mail! The result is that all the Spam is still in the Inbox. If I transfer it manually to Spam and tell Claws to learn it as spam, it seems to be doing something, but next time round I'm back to the old problem.

What am I missing? I've looked for information on this site and elsewhere, but it's all about usage on a mail server: the SpamAssassin site is totally useless.

PS Oops! I should have considered the possibility that it's not enough to install the program: I had to switch it on with system-config-services. One might ask why, of course...

As an alternative and if this is just for reading your personal mail with claws-mail on this machine, I've found the bogofilter plugin does an excellent job and is very simple to set up. Spamassassin is overkill for my personal mail.

Yes, I've heard Bogofilter is good. But SpamAssassin is certainly living up to its name. After changing my ISP, I went for several years with no spam at all, believe it or not; then one silly mistake and now I'm getting masses of stuff, much of it so obviously bogus that only a total idiot would click on the links.