mailscanner/spamassassin strangeness

[Julian Field]

At 09:07 30/01/2002, you wrote:
>I have mailscanner 3.04.1 and spamassassin 2.01. I had a message this
>morning which mailscanner marked as spam because spamassassin said 13 hits.
>I thought it was odd because the message wasn't spam and didn't really look
>spammish. I saved the message to a file and ran spamassassin -t on it. The
>score was:
>SPAM: Content analysis details:   (0.8 hits, 5 required)
>SPAM: Hit! (0.8 points)  BODY: Includes a URL link to send an email
>Can anyone suggest why spamassassin told mailscanner there were 13 hits
>when spamassassin -t doesn't even manage a whole one?

This is a symptom of a long-running SpamAssassin bug where their Perl API
occasionally gives different results to other ways of calling SA. I've yet
to be able to reproduce the problem reliably. The only other possibility is
that the rules that the user root is using are different from the default
rules. You haven't been tweaking SA config files madly have you?
--
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