Having gone through the interesting process of upgrading the server from 10.3 (Panther) to 10.4 (Tiger), I wanted to ensure the server was performing as well as possible with regard to spam filtering. I found this excellent article:- Agile Tortoise » OS X Tiger Server: Improving SpamAssassin. Excellent just what I wanted!

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mac, osx, server, spamassassin

The only thing was, having done that, I felt that the stock install of SpamAssassin with Tiger Server (3.0.1) was rather out of date - we're into 3.1.3 at the time of writing. So I asked the question as to how to upgrade (and if there was anything I should watch out for) on the Apple OS X Server forums. The reply I received was as follows:

When you have spamassassin of os x server already running it is simple to upgrade spamassassin. I never had any problems - tested on three tiger mailservers.
Simply follow the instructions on http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/spamassassin/branches/3.1/INSTALL and upgrade on 3.1.3 (it reports itself as 3.001003) using the terminal and the perl-helper-app MCPAN . When doing this the first time you may respond to the questions asked, but you can also choose you are not ready for a manual configuration. This does not interfere with amavis, clamav or anything else. Worst thing that could happen is that you need to install the most recent perl-libraries on which spamassassin is dependent on…

So, many thanks to mestopheles for just the answer I was looking for. It worked a treat, and my inbox is a little less full!

SteamSHIFT out.