Spamassassin Error: cannot create user preferences file //.spamassassin/user_prefs: Permission denied on VestaCP - CentOS

Wed, 08 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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 &lt;5520C87B.8020009@example.com&gt; 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=&lt;5520C87B.8020009@example.com&gt;,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.conf

Change the line:

spam = nobody:true/defer_ok

spam = spamd:true/defer_ok

Restart exim an spamassassin

/etc/init.d/exim restart
/etc/init.d/spamassassin restart

After 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!

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Spamassassin Error: cannot create user preferences file //.spamassassin/user_prefs: Permission denied on VestaCP - CentOS