spamassassin timeouts question

[Chris Trudeau]

>>I am not seeing failure 2 of 10 and so on..

>It is succeeding some times and failing other times. It needs to hit 10

>consecutive timeouts before SpamAssassin network checks are disabled.
20
>consecutive timeouts (including the above 10) will cause SpamAssassin
to be
>disabled altogether. Even if it keeps failing, it's usually due to
network
>checks which is why the behaviour is slightly cleverer than the simple
>configuration option suggests.

So is it safe to say that while SpamAssassin is timing out 1 of 10 the
message is automatically accepted and allowed through?  I suppose one
might expect that if it failed, it should fail closed instead of open.

I'm puzzled by this problem...because NO SPAM gets through my
MailScanner instance EXCEPT for SpamAssassin timeouts.  Would it be
possible to make this queue and rescan later?  Or at least to make this
configurable?  I know there will be a venerable uprising about holding
mail that is not able to be processed...but I want to stop these from
getting through...

It seems we have created an environment, where if the network checks
timing out can allow false positives to be processed and allowed
through, that fooling SpamAssassin and MailScanner would be as easy as
making network checks unavailable.  Then all messages would time-out and
be accepted by the instance, thus forwarded on to the end MUA.

Chris Trudeau