Replying to my own message in case anyone cares, I've sorted out my problems and got getmail and spamassassing working together properly.
For anyone who wants to do the same thing, here's what I did...
Installed getmail version 4 from http://www.qcc.ca/~charlesc/software/getmail-4/
It's much nicer than fetchmail and I haven't lost mail with it like I did with fetchmail. Just follow the instructions for the installation.
Install spamassassin and spamc packages. Something which had me stumped for a while was that you have to actually enable spamd from the spamassassin package. To do this edit /etc/default/spamassassin and set ENABLED=1
Then you can start spamd with /etc/init.d/spamassassin restart.
I use procmail to filter the mail that's been spam filtered into different folders based upon their spam rating. To use this you need to create the folders in your Maildir (use your mail client to do this, it's a lot easier). In my case I've created probably-spam and almost-certainly-spam
My getmailrc and .procmailrc are attached.
Maybe this will be useful to somebody.
To run getmail automatically periodically, run:
crontab < getmail.cron
-- Joe Wrigley Clockwork Software Systems
intY has scanned this email for all known viruses (www.inty.com)
MAILDIR = /home/joe/Maildir DEFAULT=$MAILDIR LOGFILE = /home/joe/.procmaillog.txt VERBOSE = yes
:0 * ^X-Spam-Level: \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\* .almost-certainly-spam/ :0 * ^X-Spam-Status: Yes .probably-spam/ :0 [EMAIL PROTECTED] .NottLug/ :0 *^List-Id: South Birmingham Linux User Group <sb.mailman.lug.org.uk> .SBLug/ :0 *^List-Id: Birmingham Perl Mongers mailing list <birmingham-pm.mail.pm.org> .Birmingham-PM/ :0 ./
*/30 * * * * /usr/bin/getmail >/dev/null 2>&1
[options]
verbose = 2
read_all = true
delete = true
message_log = ~/.getmail/log
[retriever]
type = SimplePOP3Retriever
server = mail.example.com
username = joe
password = password
[filter]
type = Filter_external
path = /usr/bin/spamc
[destination]
type = MultiDestination
destinations = ("[procmail-as-joe]",)
[procmail-as-joe]
type = MDA_external
path = /usr/bin/procmail
arguments = ('~joe/.procmailrc', )
user = joe
