{SPAM?} Why are all messages tagged SPAM?

[Nick Phillips]

On Mon, May 06, 2002 at 03:44:33PM +0200, Henrik Lewander wrote:
> From: "Julian Field" <jkf at ECS.SOTON.AC.UK>
> > >The headers of my mail also display the line:
> > >
> > > >X-MailScanner-SpamCheck: SpamAssasin (255 hits)
> > >
> > >twice. Is this normal?
> >
> > SpamAssassin repoting 255 hits is definitely wrong, it should be a small
> > number. I suggest you properly test your SpamAssassin installation using
> > their tests and scripts, to prove it is working properly. I haven't seen
> > this behaviour before.
>
> This happened to me after an Debian upgrade, also to a friend. Don't know why
> but i just restarted Mailscanner and it worked.

The "255 hits" appears to mean "spamassassin failed" - it does this (for
example) when it can't create the .spamassassin directory that it wants to.

It will fail to create the .spamassassin directory, again for example, when
it is running as mail and trying to create the directory /root/.spamassassin.

This happens because SpamAssassin is getting initialised at the wrong point
in the mailscanner code. And because even when it gets initialised at the
right point, it takes the value of $ENV{HOME} rather than using getpwnam
to find the correct home directory to put .spamassassin in.

I have fixed this in mailscanner CVS and once we've got through the rest of
the "todo" list we'll release it. It's a reasonable-sized list, though, so
don't hold your breath.


The reason it happened after a Debian update is probably that spamassassin
has changed the way it handles that directory.



Cheers,


Nick
--
Nick Phillips -- nwp at lemon-computing.com
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