> Try "man spamc" ... the trick is that "spamassasin" is an abstraction
> that gets realised with the two programs spamd and spamc; the first
> (spamd) is run as a daemon, and the second (spamc) is run repeatedly
> in a the mail processing pipeline for filtering emails.

Thank you for your helpful response, although I remain in the dark.

Yes man spamc speaks of a user configuration file, but does not
specify what it should be. I can hope that my old practice
to make it ~/.spamassassin/user_prefs still works. It permission is
644.

What I failed to do was to add my name to /etc/group/Debian-exim.

I found no explicit statement that spamc needs to be restarted if
there is any change in its config file such as adding an
address to the blacklist. I find it can be restarted with: #
/etc/init.d/spamd restart. This command cannot be run by user,
which makes me think spamc does not need to be restarted.

> Though I use postfix with dovecot and I'm not exactly sure how you
> configure exim4 to run spamc. Perhaps it's still by installing the
> sa-exim package and editing its configuration file...

There is no man sa-exim, but I have the impressino it filters mail before
it gets to spamassassin. I don't believe I ever relied on it.

>
> Ralph.

--

     Haines Brown