[Techtalk] spam filters again

[Maria McKinley]

Hi there,

So, I have been playing a little bit with spamassasin, and things are 
going so-so. I have turned on auto-learning, and I started using 
sa-learn. Sa-learn seems to work, although it often tells me Learned 
tokens from 0 message(s) (0 message(s) examined), but I think this is 
just because I don't have enough messages collected yet - it does 
sometimes say it has learned. But, the auto-learning doesn't seem to be 
working, and I get messages like this in the logs:

Nov 12 06:26:36 ella spamd[27507]: mkdir /nonexistent: Permission denied 
at /usr/share/perl5/Mail/SpamAssassin.pm line 1530
Nov 12 06:26:36 ella spamd[27507]: locker: safe_lock: cannot create tmp 
lockfile 
/nonexistent/.spamassassin/auto-whitelist.lock.ella.shadlen.org.2750
7 for /nonexistent/.spamassassin/auto-whitelist.lock: No such file or 
directory

I did some googling, and it seems to have something to do with my 
running spamassassin as user nobody. I found one mail-list thread that 
seemed relevant, and it said:

If you're not doing per-user configs, create yourself a spamd user, and 
pass that to spamd's -u, then use that user for your sa-learning, and 
housing your user_prefs, etc.

But, I'm not really sure what it means to pass that to spamd's -u, or 
what he is talking about re:user_prefs.

Why would the smapd user be better than using nobody? Do you who are 
running spamassassin run it as nobody or someone else? Looking around on 
the web, it looks like quite a few people use nobody, so I'm not sure 
why they aren't having the same problems. Maybe they just aren't using 
auto-learning? Does anyone have any advice about where to go from here?

Thanks a bunch,
Maria

Oh, some more info:

I am running this with postfix, and it is on debian.