SpamAssassin timeout OT: SpamAssassin timeouts

[Randy Herban]

The lookups from osirusoft were causing a problem and spamassassin was
timing out while doing these checks.  What I noticed was that MailScanner
was continuing to use spamassassin at 75 consecutive timeouts out of a
possible 20.
When the number of timeouts hit 20, it should have stopped using
spamassassin (I don't think I'm makin this part up, it's in the
documentation and has been mentioned several times on the list) until the
next restart.  At next restart the counters should drop to 0 (assumption on
my part) and if it hits 20 again, it will stop using spamassassin again.
Instead, spamassassin was continuing to be used even with 75+ consecutive
timeouts and kept queueing up the incoming mail because of this.

-Randy

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Kercher [mailto:mike at CAMAROSS.NET]
Sent: Tuesday, January 07, 2003 12:21 PM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: SpamAssassin timeout


Since MS has nothing to do with mail delivery, I don't think you can point
the finger at it.  Yesterday, about 2PM CST, I started getting complaints
from people not being able to send email...connections were timing out while
sendmail attempted to look up via osirusoft.  I removed that from my
sendmail.cf, and everything started to flow again.


-----Original Message-----
From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf
Of Rose, Bobby
Sent: Tuesday, January 07, 2003 11:17 AM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: SpamAssassin timeout


I think there is more to it.  I've always use skip_rbl for SA because I use
the rbls on the MTA side and I've been seeing the mail backing up in queue.
This also started happening after I updated to 4.11-1 on Sunday. I think
it's Mailscanner and it's mother process not restarting properly.  What I've
noticed so far is that I only have 3 MS processes running even though my
setting is set to 5.  Once process has been running for 4 hours 11 mins and
the others are the spawned processess. If I kill MS and restart then I get
all my processes back.  If I look at my logs, it looks like only one MS
processes was doing anything.

-----Original Message-----
From: Randy Herban [mailto:RHerban at GRAMTEL.NET]
Sent: Tuesday, January 07, 2003 11:22 AM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: SpamAssassin timeout


Unfortunately something that I noticed yesterday when the RBL's were offline
was that MailScanner was not ceasing to use spamassassin even though I was
up to 75 consecutive failures out of 20. I just upgraded to the newest
MS-4.11-1 yesterday as well. RedHat 8.0 if it helps.

-randy

-----Original Message-----
From: David Sullivan [mailto:David.Sullivan at BARNET.AC.UK]
Sent: Tuesday, January 07, 2003 10:38 AM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: SpamAssassin timeout


On 7 Jan 2003 at 15:28, Spicer, Kevin wrote:

> > >Is it possible to test if the RBL-server answer and if not just
> > >skip it and do the rest?
> >
> > SpamAssassin can't do that. If you do the RBL checking with
> > MailScanner, it will do what you want. SpamAssassin isn't very
> > robust when services it is using fail.
> >
>
> My understanding (read assumption!) was that if you use MailScanner to

> do the RBL checks, and then pass to SpamAssassin for further checks
> that any message from a host found in the RBL  will be marked as SPAM,

> even if the spamassassin score would have been lower than the spam
> threshold.  In other words the mailscanner RBL checks and the
> spamassassin checks are completely seperate(?).

I think you're misunderstanding the comment slightly.
If MailScanner doing RBL checks notices that they've timed out a number of
times in a row it will stop using the RBL checks till the next MailScanner
restart.

If you do the RBL checks within SpamAssassin this means that SpamAssasin as
a whole will time out and cannot "disable the RBL checks" itself (as
MailScanner does). In turn MailScanner should see that SpamAssassin is
timing out and disable it till the next MailScanner restart.

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