SpamAssassin Hangup

[Matt Kettler]

Probably your best "first stab" is to get the email (or several emails) in
an otherwise plain text format (ie: from /var/spool/mail) and run
SpamAssassin from the command line:


spamassassin -tD < /var/spool/mail/mkettler

-t puts SpamAssassin in test mode, so the email is just piped through to
the console with some status info
-D turns on debug output.

This will let you watch which part of SA's evaluation is taking too long
and also see if it's complaining about any corrupted rules.

As some side notes:

The "MX check" is likely the longest part of a SA test. By default SA will
try 3 times, waiting 5 seconds each try, to perform the MX check, which
means any email without an MX for from will timeout under MailScanner
(MailScanner only gives SA 10 seconds to run). In any event MailScanner
should kill SpamAssassin after 10 seconds by default and log a message that
it timed out.

Also how did you turn off the DNS Blacklist checks in SA? (just a
side-check to make sure you really did turn them off)



At 04:05 PM 7/15/2002 +0600, you wrote:
>Hello All,
>
>I switched to MailScanner from a milter based scanner and it really
>rocks!  LoadAvg has gone down substantially and we are from nasty milter
>problems.
>
>Unfortunately, I am having a hard time with SpamAssasin.  For most of
>the mails it's working fine, but it gets hung up for some of the mails.
>I have stopped all DNS based lookups except the MX check from SA.  DNS
>blacklists are off in MailScanner too.  MailScanner has to kill SA after
>the timeout.
>
>The list archive suggests this may be due to DNS lookups, but I think in
>our case this is not true.  Besides, mailscanner takes 100% cpu when SA
>gets stuck with those mails.  I have changed spamassassin timeout to 0
>to see how long it takes.  It consumes 100% cpu until I kill it.  I am
>on Slackware, mail traffic around 30K per day.
>
>Any ideas on what could be wrong?  Is there any easy way to debug this?
>
>
>--
>Mojahed
>System Administrator, Agni Systems Limited