SpamAssassin Prefs File problem

[Shahid Hussain]

> Shahid Hussain wrote:
> > Thank you for taking your time for kind explanation, you have really
nice
> > server machine ;)
>
> No problem.
>
> > Our MailScanner system running on:
> > 128MB ram, 6GB Hard-Drive, Intel Pentium III (498.34-MHz 686-class CPU)
and
> > 100Mbit connection. And time-out is set to 50 seconds (SpamAssassin
Timeout
> > = 50).
>
> Ouch - 128MB is really not enough, even for a dedicated mail gateway
> that does nothing other than e-mail.  With the cost of RAM being so low
> these days, try upgrading to 512MB - 256 would be "OK" as long as you
> tune your setup and disable anything else that's not needed on the
> server (DNS/databases/DHCP....anything not needed to process mail).
>
> > MailScanner will process any emails when its received.  I am not too
sure if
> > it using remote black-lists but I don't have dcc, razor, pyzor plugin
> > installed (nor /usr/local/etc/MailScanner/spam.assassin.prefs.conf is
NOT
> > used).  How do I check if it using any remote black-lists?
>
> Turn on the logging.  If you haven't installed Pyzor/Razor, they wont be
> used, but SORBS, RFCI etc, may still be in use - set the scores for the
> RBL's to zero and that will prevent spamassassin from using them.
> Custom scores go in "spam.assassin.prefs.conf" or a customised ".cf"
> file in the SpamAssassin site rules directory - the site rules directory
> is set in MailScanner.conf.  Read the SpamAssassin::Conf documentation
> on how to score rules and/or create your own :)
>
> > Bayes is disabled in MainScanner.conf (Rebuild Bayes Every = 0)
>
> That just prevents the Bayesian database from being rebuilt.  If you
> want to disable Bayes you need to add the following line to
> spam.assassin.prefs.conf:
>
> use_bayes 0
>
> > I only receive about 10/20 emails every 30-60 minutes and MailScanner is
> > doing the job well.  But if I receive an email like 10/20 at the same
time
> > then MainScanner will acting crazy when I tested with
> > http://www.gfi.com/emailsecuritytest/
>
> OK - reduce the number of messages in a single batch and/or the size of
> a batch (bytes).  Also with that sort of volume, you could get away with
> as little as one child - no need to run 5 (default).  You can also
> reduce the amount of data that is fed to spamassassin regardless of the
> message size: ie, only feed it the first 10kB of a message, this wont
> affect the score dramatically, but will reduce the load on your server
> noticeably and speed up scanning.  All this has been covered a number of
> times in the archives and the MAQ:
> Archives: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/mailscanner.html
> MAQ:      http://www.mailscanner.biz/maq/  (specifically section 9.0)
>
> Please research your problems with those two sources :)  Saves your time
> waiting for replies and saves bandwidth coz we don't have to say the
> same stuff over and over....no offence to you.
>
> Cheers,
>
> James
>

Thanks for big help, that's helped me a lot ;)

I agree with you, I do need big memory ram - I will have to ask the data
center to upgrade it.


Oh by the way I just used "top" while mailscanner is processing - it does
eat up a lot of memory:


Mem: 58M Active, 19M Inact, 22M Wired, 6664K Cache, 22M Buf, 14M Free
Swap: 238M Total, 116M Used, 122M Free, 48% Inuse

PID   USERNAME  PRI NICE   SIZE    RES    STATE      TIME    WCPU    CPU
COMMAND
36633 mail       -6   0  31316K  14116K piperd   0:07  1.83%  1.76% perl

------------------

Mem: 80M Active, 15M Inact, 24M Wired, 528K Cache, 22M Buf, 488K Free
Swap: 238M Total, 106M Used, 133M Free, 44% Inuse, 1840K Out

PID   USERNAME  PRI NICE  SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
37949 mail       28   0 16428K 15760K RUN      0:01  5.42%  2.29% clamscan

bad eh? :)

Thanks again James, nice to meet ya by the way!

Shahid

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