Greetings,

Would someone kindly summarize in a few sentences how
spamassassin does its work? I.e., I know *what* it does
-- takes email input, and either judges it normal and
elivers it, or dispatches it according to the rules,
while keeping logs and all.

More pertinently, what I don't know is: *how( does
incoming mail get passed to spamassassin? I use
fetchmail to POP my mail from Cox. I also have procmail
running with a bunch of rules of its own. Where does
spamassassin fit in there?

Apparently it must do its job *before* procmail (or
whatever one uses to make final delivery) gets ahold of
it, right? My procmail filters mail according to a
complex set of rules that includes some anti-spam rules
(and which I could simplify with spamassassin working),
and then handes it to one of seven spool files.

I've seen I can take single email messages and run

  cat messagefile | spamassassin

and get wonderful and interesting output.

Does anyone have or can anyone point to an existing
bullet list of steps to take to get spamassassin
actually functioning on a system -- something short and
simple, like step (a), step (b), step (c) ... and not
much more.

It exists on my system (version 2.44), and I have a
directory ~/.spamassassin with a couple of generic
files that were evidently copied in the first time I
tried to execute it from a command line, namely
auto-whitelist and user_prefs, obviously a local
configuration file for the rules that apply.

Maybe I've already done what's necessary? I'm just
missing the vital piece of information about how to
start the engine. :-)

Thanks,

-- 
Lynn David Newton
Phoenix, AZ