Troubleshooting SPAM REPORT : TIMED OUT errors

[Matt Kettler]

At 03:16 PM 4/15/2004, Brian Lewis wrote:
>Every 20 messages or so I get a spam message that has a 0.00 spam rating
>and has SPAM REPORT : TIMED OUT (MailWatch Interface).  /var/log/maillog
>shows that it killed the SpamAssassin because it timed out.  I tried
>increasing the interval to 120 seconds in mailscanner config but that
>hasn't helped (restarted service after change).
>command line lint test looks good, about 10 seconds to perform all the
>tests. And obviously its working 1 out of every 20 times.


Before you go to the extent of adding extra logs, etc, I've got a
suggestion that deals with most cases of this problem.

Run a sa-learn --force-expire and edit spam.assassin.prefs.conf to include:
         bayes_auto_expire 0

Generally what's happening is SA is trying to expire bayes tokens as it
processes messages.. this is long and slow so mailscanner kills it.

Newer versions of MS can manage expiry directly, so you can either use a
recent version of MS or add sa-learn --force-expire as a daily cronjob.
Either way you should probably disable bayes_auto_expire.