SpamAssassin timeout

[Rose, Bobby]

MS does interfer with delivery.  Mail comes into the incoming queue and
will sit there until MS scans it and drops it into the outgoing queue if
you have it set to the queue option.  If it's set to batch then it
actually fires off a sendmail process to deliver it.  So in effect it
does have a lot to do with delivery.

Regardless of all that, what I've seen with the 4.11-1 code is that
there is something going on either with the automatic 4 hr restart or
with the starting of new processes after that 4hr restart.  

This morning I had 700 message in the incoming queue with 3 MS processes
and no RBL checks being done by SA so I'm not seeing the SA timeouts.
After I killed MS and restarted it, everything cleared up again.  So
there is something else going on here.




-----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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