Error: SpamAssassin - config: no rules were found! Do you need to run 'sa-update'?

You run

spamassassin --lint

and get the following output:

[root ~]# spamassassin --lint
 config: no rules were found! Do you need to run 'sa-update'?
 [root ~]#

Solution

You need to download the latest SpamAssassin rules by running

sa-update

You can create a cron job that does this automatically. First find out the full path for sa-update:

which sa-update

[root ~]# which sa-update
 /usr/bin/sa-update
 [root ~]#

Then create a cron job like this, using the full path to sa-update:

crontab -e

23 4 * * * /usr/bin/sa-update &> /dev/null

This runs sa-update each day at 4.23h.