Re: SpamAssassin two level verification between remote hosts

Christopher,

running multiple instances of spamd/spamassassin is the easy part, if they're on 
separate physical or virtual machines or on the same machine in containers 
(Docker, Kuberneties, etc). If they're directly on the same host then you need 
to be careful about their configurations, make sure each one has its own config 
file, pid file, rules files, working "HOME directory", Bayes db instance, etc.

In general spamassassin does not 'verify' messages, it just looks at them and 
assigns a numerical score based on multiple "grading" criteria. 
It is true that one of the criteria is if a message has a DKIM/DMARK signature 
and the validity thereof but that is usually a small part of the score.
Think of it like multiple teachers grading a student's term-paper.

The tricky part of scanning a message by more than one spamd is making sure that 
your 'glue' architecture is giving each spamd instance a pristine unaltered copy 
of the message, not one that has been 'marked up' by preceding spamd instances.

I frequently run more than one spamd instance to test out new versions of SA 
and test-drive trial rule sets.
I handle this by making the earlier instance(s) run in "silent" mode (IE not add 
any classification or score headers) and only have the last instance actually add 
the usual scoring headers and if needed trigger a SMTP reject on high scoring spam.
The only way that I know the "opinions" of the earlier SA instances is to look 
at their log entries, they don't show up in the messages.

Hope that helps.
Dave

On Mon, 18 May 2026, FalconChristopher wrote:

> I want to get some understanding which I can run multiple `spamd` as long as 
> as the daemon is running by using the -host or -port flags. Therefore if I'm 
> running SpamAssassin on a remote server, then running SpamAssassin on another 
> remote server. I assume the emails can pass though two layers of verification 
> ?
>
> Christopher
>
>

-- 
Dave Funk                               University of Iowa
<dbfunk (at) engineering.uiowa.edu>     College of Engineering
319/335-5751   FAX: 319/384-0549        1256 Seamans Center, 103 S Capitol St.
Sys_admin/Postmaster/cell_admin         Iowa City, IA 52242-1527
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