Spamassassin, Kmail, and SuSE Linux

[indieFan]

Hey Everyone,

I've been a fan of Linux for years, but never learned how to install new programs on it. (My ex always took care of it.) Now, four years later, I'm struggling to install Spamassassin for use with Kmail on SuSE 9.0.

I thought I had installed the program according the the directions on the website, but when I opened up Kmail, all of the spam came through.

Any help would be appreciated,
indieFan

[Raven_Writer]

I'm not familiar w/ installing on Linux, but this is what a lot of people say to do:

./configure
make
make-install

I'm not sure if that'll work, but you can try it. (You have to type that into a Konsole by the way).

[garth]

I wanted to make a small correction to avoid any confusion-- "make-install" is not supposed to have a dash:

./configure
make
make install

The above commands compile a program. That is, usually for use with programs downloaded in *.tar.gz format or another compressed format. After it is uncompressed, (usually tar -xgf nameOfFile.tar.gz), open the directory in a console and type the above commands.

However, downloading a *.rpm file is easier to install, if you can find one. Just open it.

[garth]

now it's time to correct myself-- The decompress command was tar -xzf NameOfFile.tar.gz, not what I said before.

[rbayer]

First of all, there is very little reason to compile from source any more. Yes, you certainly can do it with tar/make/make install, but that's a pain in the but, and makes it very hard to uninstall later.

If your system has it, a much better way of doing this is with a wonderful little program called apt-get. All you have to do is type "apt-get <package name>" into a command prompt and it will automatically find, download, and install the software for you. Plus, since apt-get did all the work, you can fairly easily uninstall software later.

As for SpamAssassin, keep in mind that you need to tell Kmail to use it -- simply installing SpamAssassin doesn't actually bind it to your email program. See this document for a good overview of how to do this.