SpamAssassin rules - intermittent failures being observed

[Quentin Campbell]

This site makes heavy use of local rules to tune the behaviour of SA for
our environment. I am running MS 4.10-1 and SA 2.43 under RH 7.3.

I have begun to notice occasional failures by SA to apply some of it own
rules as well as some local rules to messages as they pass through
MailScanner + SpamAssassin. The problem appears to be intermittent. 

The rules that are sometimes missed seem to be the same ones each time.

In all cases the rules _are_ correctly applied when a mailbox copy of
the messages is run through "spamassassin -t". Running "spamassassin
--lint" indicates that the rules are OK and using the "-D" option shows
that the correct hierarchy of directories are being searched.

Has anybody else experienced behaviour of this kind?

Can any SpamAssassin user confirm that a "body" pattern test applies to
the headers of the message as well as the body at their site? It
certainly does here although the 2.43 writeup implies that the "body"
pattern test should only apply to the message body, not the message
headers. This anomaly effects the scoring of messages and means that
"meta" tests may need to be introduced where the same/similar pattern is
used in both a "header" and a "body" rule.  

Quentin
---
PHONE: +44 191 222 8209    Computing Service, University of Newcastle
FAX:   +44 191 222 8765    Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom, NE1 7RU.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Any opinion expressed above is mine. The University can get its own."