getmail / spamassassin integration failing

Hello,


I've been running getmail on a vanilla debian bullseye VM for a few 
years, the sole purpose of this vm is managing my email over the last 
couple of decades.

I've been a happy user of getmail, i love how much easier it has been to 
configure vs fetchmail.  recently the onslaught of spam has gotten to be 
too much

so i want to integrate spamassassin into my system.  I've read the 
documentation, and i'm not getting desired behavior.


My config file is:

[retriever]

type = SimplePop3Retriever

server = some server

username = username

password = password


[filter-1]

type = Filter_external

path = /usr/sbin/spamd

arguments = ("-s 250000", )


[destination]

type = MultiGuesser

default = ~/Maildir/inbox/

locals = some list sorting (not important, and works)


Now, i've been running getmail as a user all this time, it works fine.  
I added the filter 1 above, and it doesn't work any longer because i 
believe spamd requires root priveleges.  I don't want to do that

as a user if possible, so i was trying to move to root cron job to have 
getmail do all it's business and deliver to my user maildir, but getmail 
won't deliver to a user box as root, so i read the documentation

that user could be specified to bypass this, but it doesn't work.

I can't find any other documentation on the webs to configure this to 
properly work and getmail is not honoring the user = user argument.

Where do i go from here?  I would greatly prefer not to go scorched 
earth and move to something else, now that i have a system that works so 
nicely, just can't handle 500 spams a day.