The various SpamAssassin scripts have a debug option (-D) which can optionally take a list of channels which will restrict what information is displayed. People have asked which channels are available. However, the channels are dynamic based on the code that is running. When looking at the debug output, the first word (pre-colon) is the logging level (dbg, info, warn, error,) and the second word (pre-colon) is the channel. ie:

[20784] dbg: message: main message type: text/plain
[20784] dbg: bayes: DB journal sync: last sync: 1148309062
[20784] dbg: check: is spam? score=-0.156 required=5
[20784] dbg: check: tests=BAYES_00,MISSING_SUBJECT,NO_RECEIVED,NO_RELAYS,TO_CC_NONE

has the channels message, bayes, and check. While the channels are dynamic in nature, below are the standard ones that are in use as of v3.1.2 (this is not a complete list).

Note: debug mode will show a certain amount of information, while some channels will give more details if the channel is used specifically. ie: "-D" vs "-D bayes".

spamassassin and spamd channels

accessdb



 all

 
 The default if _-D_ is specified without any parameters.  Can be useful in combination with other channels to get more output, such as _-D all,bayes_.
 


 archive-iterator

 


 auto-whitelist

 


 bayes

 
 Information related to the Bayesian classifier, including DB access, expiry, etc.  When specifically added, will also output information about individual tokens and their Bayes score.
 


 check

 
 Information related to the [PerMsgStatus]::check() function, which generally includes which rule priorities are being run, the ham/spam decision, message score, and list of (sub)rules that matched.
 


 config

 
 Configuration files and related.

 


 dcc

 


 diag

 


 dk

 


 dkim

 


 dns

 


 eval

 


 generic

 


 hashcash

 


 ident

 


 ignore

 


 info

 


 ldap

 


 learn

 


 locker

 


 log

 


 logger

 


 markup

 


 message

 
 Debug information from the message/MIME parser.

 


 metadata

 


 netcache

 


 plugin

 


 prefork

 


 pyzor

 


 razor2

 


 received-header

 


 replacetags

 


 reporter

 


 rules

 
 Merges of duplicate rules, progress of rule processing, rule hits.

 


 rules-all

 
 Rule names before execution (regardless of hits). Very useful for locating a runaway rule that is causing SA to hang.

 


 spamd

 


 spf

 


 textcat

 


 uri

 


 uridnsbl

 


 util

 



generated via:



$ egrep -hr '(info|dbg)\(' spamassassin.raw spamd lib | perl -nle 'next unless /^\s*(?:info|dbg)\(.([^:]+):/; print $1' | sort -u






sa-update channels


 channel

 


 diag

 


 dns

 


 generic

 


 gpg

 


 http

 


 sha1

 



generated via:



egrep -hr '(info|dbg)\(' sa-update.raw | perl -nle 'next unless /^\s*(?:info|dbg)\(.([^:]+):/; print $1' | sort -u