SA whitelist db grows over time

[Julian Field]

At 15:23 25/10/2002, you wrote:
>    Solaris 8, sendmail 8.12.6, spamassassin 2.43, mailscanner 3.24-1
>(sorry, I'm too timid to jump to v4 in the middle of the semester,
>I'm aiming for Thanksgiving break).
>
>    I've noticed that auto-whitelist.dir and auto-whitelist.pag files
>in /.spamassassin grow over time.  This morning I found a 52 MB .pag
>file!!  I stopped mailscanner, zapped these two files, and restarted
>mailscanner.  Spamassassin created new .dir and .pag files, and they
>have been growing in size again since I did this (about 90 minutes ago).
>When I did a "strings" on the .pag file, it has domain names, email
>addresses, and IP numbers separated by pipe symbols -- akin to a
>procmail filter recipe.

It is SpamAssassin's auto-whitelist, which is bound to grow as you receive
mail from many different addresses and it is trying to work out some stats
on all of them.

In the SpamAssassin distribution, there is a program
         tools/check_whitelist
which will output all the stats in your auto-whitelist.

>Do these files get zapped
>and recreated at the 4-hour mailscanner restart interval?

No.

>   Should they?

No.

>If v4 doesn't do the 4-hour restart,

It does do the 4-hour restart.

>  what effect does this have on v4?

Shouldn't affect it much as DBM lookups are very fast, and the DBM file is
held open during the 4-hour lifetime.
--
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