Installing the spamass-milter-postfix package changes the default behaviour of spamass-milter to be more Postfix-friendly, i.e.: The Unix-domain socket used for MTA communication is changed to /var/run/spamass-milter/postfix/sock, and that socket is writable by the postfix group. To configure Postfix to use the milter, add to /etc/postfix/main.cf: smtpd_milters = unix:/var/run/spamass-milter/postfix/sock In addition: milter_connect_macros must include the j and _ macros milter_rcpt_macros must include the b, r, v, and Z macros Most of these are present by default and shouldn't need explicitly setting, except for the _ macro in milter_connect_macros. You can use: postconf -d milter_connect_macros to find the current setting, and add _ to the returned value, e.g. milter_connect_macros = j {daemon_name} v _ Note that Postfix users will see the following warning logged at the time of the first connection to the milter: Could not retrieve sendmail macro "i"!. Please add it to confMILTER_MACROS_ENVFROM for better spamassassin results This is a consequence of different design decisions between Postfix and Sendmail (which spamass-milter is written for), where Postfix does not assign a Queue ID to an incoming message until later in an SMTP transaction compared with Sendmail. The milter wants to use the information before Postfix can provide it, hence the message. It is harmless and can be ignored. For further information, see: http://www.postfix.org/MILTER_README.html