SpamAssassin being killed

[Matt Kettler]

By default Mailscanner gives spamassassin 30 seconds to run before timing out.
Unfortunately SpamAssassin gives DNSBL lookups 30 seconds to complete
before timing out.

This means that any time a DNS blacklist used by SpamAssassin is
inaccessable/offline in a default configuration mailscanner will kill
spamassassin.

Here's my recommendation (re-cut from an old post to the SpamAsassin-talk
mailing list)

I changed SpamAssassin's timeout for DNSBLs editing MailScanner's
spam.assassin.user.prefs to include:

# the following reduces the time for a run of SA
# but risks timing out valid blacklist data or falsely claiming no mx for from.
# it is still better to timeout a blacklist than
# to have mailscanner timeout SA and skip it entirely
check_mx_attempts 2
check_mx_delay  3
rbl_timeout 10
razor_timeout 10

I changed MailScanner's maximum SA run time by editing mailscanner.conf:
SpamAssassin Timeout = 40


At 12:45 PM 10/31/2002 -0800, Bill Anderson wrote:
>I just started getting a bunch of these in my log file and MailScanner will
>stop scanning for mail for spam:
>
>Oct 31 00:33:04 xr400 mailscanner[12044]: SpamAssassin timed out and was
>killed, consecutive failure 10 of 10.
>
>I know I can up the number, but why is this happening?  Is there anything
>else that can be done as well.  Thanks.
>
>I am running version 3.23-4 of mailscanner.