Need to optimise SpamAssassin with MailScanner

[Quentin Campbell]

Julian

Thanks for the reply.

Moving RBL+ back into MailScanner makes no difference. If it is a DNS
problem (with the Net::DNS stuff that I had to install along with
SpamAssassin) then other checks within SpamAssassin, such as the MX
check and the Razor check, are also likely to cause problems are they
not?

The more serious problem (bug?) is that if the SpamAssasin timeout is
invoked then MailSanner does not then ignore SpamAssassin for that batch
of messages and force their delivery but instead keeps trying repeatedly
to re-run SpamAssassin on that same batch of messages. I infer this
behaviour because the same process ID prefixes whole groups of the
"SpamAssasin timed out..." messages in the sendmail logs. That said, it
does _eventually_ seem to deliver that batch of messahes (after an
hour?).  

I will have a look at the Net::DNS install since I do not know how it
interfaces with the resolver stuff in Solaris (ie. does it use
/etc/nsswitch.conf, etc).

Quentin
---
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"Any opinion expressed above is mine. The University can get its own."  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Julian Field [mailto:jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk] 
> Sent: 23 January 2002 11:17
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: Re: Need to optimise SpamAssassin with MailScanner
> 
> 
> At 11:05 23/01/2002, you wrote:
> >Individually both work well. On enabling SpamAssassin within 
> >MailScanner I found that to get SpamAssassin to work I had to up the 
> >SpamAssassin Timeout to 20 (from 10). Without this change 
> the sendmail 
> >logs showed "SpamAssassin timed out and was killed" every 
> time it was 
> >invoked on a batch of messages.
> >
> >Even with a value of 20 (seconds?) there was a time 
> yesterday when that 
> >was not high enough.
> >
> >I am running MailScanner/SpamAssassin on our Mail Relay with the 
> >lightest load. Even with SpamAssassin enabled it normally 
> runs at more 
> >than 90% idle. Our Mail relays are Sparc Ultra-5_10s (400MHz) with 
> >384MB of memory. The behaviour is curious on such a lightly loaded 
> >system.
> >
> >Note that I have disabled RBL+ plus checking by MailScanner and have 
> >instead enabled it within SpamAssassin (specifying 
> >rbl-plus.mail-abuse.ja.net and a weight of 10 in the 
> >/etc/mail/spamassassin.cf file).
> >
> >Any pointers as to what might be happening would be welcome.
> 
> Almost certainly DNS lookup delays. What happens if you move 
> the RBL+ checking back into MailScanner? 20 seconds checking 
> per message is not really practical...
> --
> 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
>