The FreeBSD Diary

spamd is a wonderfully simple but amazingly effective spam fighting tool. It originated with the OpenBSD project. I've been using it since early 2007. This short post documents a situation I've seen a few people encounter lately.

spamd-setup is usually run on a regular basis via cron. It can be used to download various lists of spam sources. The OpenBSD website has a number of available lists. Sometimes lists go away. Sometimes new lists come into being..

Not so long ago, I started seeing message like this:

From: root@nyi.example.org (Cron Daemon) To: root@nyi.example.org Subject: Cron /usr/local/sbin/spamd-setup X-Cron-Env: X-Cron-Env: X-Cron-Env: X-Cron-Env: X-Cron-Env: Message-Id: <20091121014804.0A0DE509A3@nyi.example.org> Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:48:03 +0000 (GMT) ftp: Error retrieving file - `404 Not Found' ftp: Error retrieving file - `404 Not Found'

This is the output from the cronjob which invokes spamd-setup. From what you can see, two lists are not being retrieved. But which two?

Let's run things in debug mode with a dry run and see what we get:

# /usr/local/sbin/spamd-setup -nd
Getting http://www.openbsd.org/spamd/traplist.gz
blacklist uatraps 51165 entries
Getting http://www.openbsd.org/spamd/nixspam.gz
blacklist nixspam 40000 entries
Getting http://www.openbsd.org/spamd/SBL.cidr.gz
ftp: Error retrieving file - `404 Not Found'
blacklist spamhaus 0 entries
Getting http://www.openbsd.org/spamd/spews_list_level1.txt.gz
ftp: Error retrieving file - `404 Not Found'
blacklist spews1 0 entries

That's pretty clear. SBL and SPEWS are not there. /usr/local/etc/spamd.conf contains the problem lines:

all:\
        :uatraps:nixspam:spamhaus:spews1

Changing it to this solves the problem:

all:\
        :uatraps:nixspam

There are other such lists availble at the OpenBSD website, but those are the two I use.