Provided by: spamc_4.0.1-2_amd64 
NAME
spamc - client for spamd
SYNOPSIS
spamc [options] < message
DESCRIPTION
Spamc is the client half of the spamc/spamd pair. It should be used in place of
"spamassassin" in scripts to process mail. It will read the mail from STDIN, and spool it
to its connection to spamd, then read the result back and print it to STDOUT. Spamc has
extremely low overhead in loading, so it should be much faster to load than the whole
spamassassin program.
See the README file in the spamd directory of the SpamAssassin distribution for more
details.
OPTIONS
All options detailed below can be passed as command line arguments, or be contained in a
configuration file, as described in the CONFIGURATION FILE section below.
Note that the long options, a la "--long-options", are new as of SpamAssassin 3.2.0, and
were not available in earlier versions.
-B, --bsmtp
Assume input is a single BSMTP-formatted message. In other words, spamc will pull out
everything between the DATA line and the lone-dot line to feed to spamd, and will
place the spamd output back in the same envelope (thus, any SIZE extension in your
BSMTP file will cause many problems).
-c, --check
Just check if the message is spam or not. Set process exitcode to 1 if message is
spam, 0 if not spam or processing failure occurs. Will print score/threshold to
stdout (as ints) or 0/0 if there was an error. Combining -c and -E is a no-op, since
-c implies the behaviour of -E.
-d host[,host2], --dest=host[,host2]
In TCP/IP mode, connect to spamd server on given host (default: localhost). Several
hosts can be specified if separated by commas.
If host resolves to multiple addresses, then spamc will fail-over to the other
addresses, if the first one cannot be connected to. It will first try all addresses
of one host before it tries the next one in the list. Note that this fail-over
behaviour is incompatible with -x; if that switch is used, fail-over will not occur.
-4 Use IPv4 only for connecting to server. Restricts domain name resolution of spamd
server host(s) to address family AF_INET through the "hints.ai_family" flag in the
call to getaddrinfo(3).
-6 Use IPv6 only for connecting to server. Restricts domain name resolution of spamd
server host(s) to address family AF_INET6 through the "hints.ai_family" flag in the
call to getaddrinfo(3).
-e command [args], --pipe-to command [args]
Instead of writing to stdout, pipe the output to command's standard input. Note that
there is a very slight chance mail will be lost here, because if the fork-and-exec
fails there's no place to put the mail message.
Note that this must be the LAST command line option, as everything after the -e is
taken as arguments to the command (it's like rxvt or xterm).
This option is not supported on Win32 platforms.
-E, --exitcode
Filter according to the other options, but set the process exitcode to 1 if message is
spam, 0 if not spam or processing failure occurs.
-F /path/to/file, --config=path
Specify a configuration file to read additional command-line flags from. See
CONFIGURATION FILE below.
-h, --help
Print this help message and terminate without action.
-H, --randomize
For TCP/IP sockets, randomize the IP addresses returned for the hosts given by the -d
switch. This provides for a simple kind of load balancing. It will try only three
times though.
-l, --log-to-stderr
Send log messages to stderr, instead of to the syslog.
-L learn type, --learntype=type
Send message to spamd for learning. The "learn type" can be either spam, ham or
forget. The exitcode for spamc will be set to 0 if the message was learned or if it
had already been learned. Non-zero exitcodes indicate an actual failure of some sort.
Note that the "spamd" must run with the "--allow-tell" option for this to work.
-C report type, --reporttype=type
Report or revoke a message to one of the configured collaborative filtering databases.
The "report type" can be either report or revoke.
Note that the "spamd" must run with the "--allow-tell" option for this to work.
-p port, --port=port
In TCP/IP mode, connect to spamd server listening on given port (default: 783).
-r, --full-spam
Just output the SpamAssassin report text to stdout, if the message is spam. If the
message is ham (non-spam), nothing will be printed. The first line of the output is
the message score and the threshold, in this format:
score/threshold
-R, --full
Just output the SpamAssassin report text to stdout, for all messages. See -r for
details of the output format used.
-s max_size, --max-size=max_size
Set the maximum message size which will be sent to spamd -- any bigger than this
threshold and the message will be returned unprocessed (default: 500 KB). If spamc
gets handed a message bigger than this, it won't be passed to spamd. The maximum
message size is 256 MB.
The size is specified in bytes, as a positive integer greater than 0. For example, -s
500000.
--connect-retries=retries
Retry connecting to spamd retries times. The default is 3 times.
--retry-sleep=sleep
Sleep for sleep seconds between attempts to connect to spamd. The default is 1
second.
--filter-retries=retries
Retry filtering retries times if the spamd process fails (usually times out). This
differs from --connect-retries in that it times out the transaction after the TCP
connection has been established successfully. The default is 1 time (ie. one attempt
and no retries).
--filter-retry-sleep=sleep
Sleep for sleep seconds between failed spamd filtering attempts. The default is 1
second.
-S, --ssl
If spamc was built with support for SSL, encrypt data to and from the spamd process
with SSL; spamd must support SSL as well.
--ssl-cert=certfile
Authenticate to spamd server with a SSL client certificate. Specify the certificate
file to use.
--ssl-key=keyfile
Authenticate to spamd server with a SSL client certificate. Specify the certificate
key file to use.
--ssl-ca-file=cafile
Use the specified Certificate Authority certificate to verify the server certificate.
The server certificate must be signed by this certificate.
--ssl-ca-path=capath
Use the Certificate Authority certificate files in the specified set of directories to
verify the server certificate. The server certificate must be signed by one of these
Certificate Authorities. See the man page for IO::Socket::SSL for additional details.
-t timeout, --timeout=timeout
Set the timeout for spamc-to-spamd communications (default: 600, 0 disables). If
spamd takes longer than this many seconds to reply to a message, spamc will abort the
connection and treat this as a failure to connect; in other words the message will be
returned unprocessed.
-n timeout, --connect-timeout=timeout
Set the timeout for spamc-to-spamd connection establishment (default: 600, 0
disables). If spamc takes longer than this many seconds to establish a connection to
spamd, spamc will abort the connection and treat this as a failure to connect; in
other words the message will be returned unprocessed.
-u username, --username=username
To have spamd use per-user-config files, run spamc as the user whose config files
spamd should load; by default the effective user-ID is sent to spamd. If you're
running spamc as some other user, though, (eg. root, mail, nobody, cyrus, etc.) then
you may use this flag to override the default.
-U socketpath, --socket=path
Connect to "spamd" via UNIX domain socket socketpath instead of a TCP/IP connection.
This option is not supported on Win32 platforms.
-V, --version
Report the version of this "spamc" client. If built with SSL support, an additional
line will be included noting this, like so:
SpamAssassin Client version 3.0.0-rc4
compiled with SSL support (OpenSSL 0.9.7d 17 Mar 2004)
-x, --no-safe-fallback
Disables the 'safe fallback' error-recovery method, which passes through the unaltered
message if an error occurs. Instead, exit with an error code, and let the MTA queue
up the mails for a retry later. See also "EXIT CODES".
This also disables the TCP fail-over behaviour from -d.
-X, --unavailable-tempfail
When disabling 'safe fallback' with -x, this option will turn EX_UNAVAILABLE errors
into EX_TEMPFAIL. This may allow your MTA to defer mails with a temporary SMTP error
instead of bouncing them with a permanent SMTP error. See also "EXIT CODES".
-y, --tests
Just output the names of the tests hit to stdout, on one line, separated by commas.
-K Perform a keep-alive check of spamd, instead of a full message check.
-z Use gzip compression to compress the mail message sent to "spamd". This is useful for
long-distance use of spamc over the internet. Note that this relies on "zlib" being
installed on the "spamc" client side, and the "Compress::Zlib" perl module on the
server side; an error will be returned otherwise.
--headers
Perform a scan, but instead of allowing any part of the message (header and body) to
be rewritten, limit rewriting to only the message headers. This is much more efficient
in bandwidth usage, since the response message transmitted back from the spamd server
will not include the body.
Note that this only makes sense if you are using "report_safe 0" in the scanning
configuration on the remote end; with "report_safe 1", it is likely to result in
corrupt messages.
CONFIGURATION FILE
The above command-line switches can also be loaded from a configuration file.
The format of the file is similar to the SpamAssassin rules files; blank lines and lines
beginning with "#" are ignored. Any space-separated words are considered additions to the
command line, and are prepended. Newlines are treated as equivalent to spaces. Existing
command line switches will override any settings in the configuration file.
If the -F switch is specified, that file will be used. Otherwise, "spamc" will attempt to
load spamc.conf in "SYSCONFDIR" (default: /etc/spamassassin). If that file doesn't exist,
and the -F switch is not specified, no configuration file will be read.
Example:
# spamc global configuration file
# connect to "server.example.com", port 783
-d server.example.com
-p 783
# max message size for scanning = 350k
-s 350000
EXIT CODES
By default, spamc will use the 'safe fallback' error recovery method. That means, it will
always exit with an exit code of 0, even if an error was encountered. If any error
occurs, it will simply pass through the unaltered message.
The -c and -E options modify this; instead, spamc will use an exit code of 1 if the
message is determined to be spam.
If one of the "-x", "-L" or "-C" options are specified, 'safe fallback' will be disabled,
and certain error conditions related to communication between spamc and spamd will result
in an error code.
The exit codes used are as follows:
EX_USAGE 64 command line usage error
EX_DATAERR 65 data format error
EX_NOINPUT 66 cannot open input
EX_NOUSER 67 addressee unknown
EX_NOHOST 68 host name unknown
EX_UNAVAILABLE 69 service unavailable
EX_SOFTWARE 70 internal software error
EX_OSERR 71 system error (e.g., can't fork)
EX_OSFILE 72 critical OS file missing
EX_CANTCREAT 73 can't create (user) output file
EX_IOERR 74 input/output error
EX_TEMPFAIL 75 temp failure; user is invited to retry
EX_PROTOCOL 76 remote error in protocol
EX_NOPERM 77 permission denied
EX_CONFIG 78 configuration error
* The EX_TOOBIG error level is never used. If spamc receives a message
that is too big, the exit code will be 0.
EX_TOOBIG 98 message was too big to process (see --max-size)
SEE ALSO
spamd(8) spamassassin(1) Mail::SpamAssassin(3)
PREREQUISITES
"Mail::SpamAssassin"
AUTHORS
The SpamAssassin(tm) Project <https://spamassassin.apache.org/>
COPYRIGHT
SpamAssassin is distributed under the Apache License, Version 2.0, as described in the
file "LICENSE" included with the distribution.