MailScanner/SA crash (regex limit?)

Julian Field mailscanner at ecs.soton.ac.uk
Sat Aug 10 16:53:25 IST 2002


I've just had a look at the latest code, and it should be relatively easy
to fix. All the code is there already, just it may stop when it encounters
a SpamAssassin problem (other than a timeout). There may be a log message
starting with "SpamAssassin failed with real error:". Did you get that log
message?

What version were you running?
What were the last things that MailScanner logged?

Is there any chance of a copy of the message that caused the error please?
I will obviously only use it for testing the code to get this problem
fixed, and I will keep it entirely confidential.

I've never been able to crash SpamAssassin in this way, making it a little
difficult to test!

At 14:57 10/08/2002, you wrote:
>Had my first MailScanner problem in quite a while this morning (well, it
>isn't really MailScanner, I suspect it is SpamAssassin, or rather some Perl
>limitation).  Error is as follows:
>
>Quantifier in {,} bigger than 32766 before HERE mark in regex m/^45962\ \
>Subject: (.{ << HERE 45953})/
>
>MailScanner would croak after the above error, and ~7,000 messages backed
>up in the few hours it was looping with this error.  I turned off
>SpamAssassin checking, and things went through OK.  Suggestions as to ways
>to prevent this from occuring in the future?  Why would MailScanner not
>just bypass the message causing it to croak and move on to the next one?
>
>--Mike

--
Julian Field                Teaching Systems Manager
jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk         Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science
Tel. 023 8059 2817          University of Southampton
                             Southampton SO17 1BJ



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