Spamassissin compleatly ballsed - what to do?

[Jan-Peter Koopmann]

On Tuesday, November 09, 2004 8:12 PM Colin Alston wrote: 

> Seems people got compleatly hung up by a mistake in my message and to
> be honest I'm not all that impressed with the attitude I recived.

Excuse me? I surely must have missed something here... After re-reading
your message I still do not see how/why we could have reacted in a
different way. All you said was:

- Your SpamAssassin is stuffed --> This could mean it is not working,
the bayes database is stuffed with "wrong" tokens, timeouts,
false-positives, false-negatives and so on. Not very clear

- You are seeing "X-Slipgate-MailScanner: Found to be clean" and
woundering why it says so since the message is spam --> "Found to be
clean" only refers to viruses not spam

- Your low score is set to 5 and high score set to 15 and the message is
not detected as spam --> It was with a score of 9 and tagged as spam

- Worst case: You are getting SpamAssassin timeouts

We pointed exactly this out not knowing your pain is somewhere else and
now you are "unimpressed" with the attitude? Frankly: What attitude did
you expect? Mindreading? :-) This mailing-list has a very high attitude
when it comes to helping others. Agreed: Some of us - including myself -
are annoyed by people asking the same questions over and over again
without even bothering looking through the archives, FAQ, MAQ. But this
was not the case here so I fail to see why you are complaining (if you
are).

> I'll try to clear things up.  

Thanks.

> I am not using RBL's.

Are you sure? Because in a later message you say:

> Thank you, disabling the RBL's properly seems to have fixed it up.

> As for the MAQ on optimizing SA the only thing that is not accounted
> for already (most by Debian defaults) is DCC and I'm rather hesitant
> on that.  

Why?

> To give an idea on the machine I'll copy the template from the MAQ
> 
> *Hardware*: Celeron 1.8 Ghz , 512MB RAM, one 80GB IDE drive
> *Software*: Debian SID (2.4.26 Kernel), Postfix, Spamassasin,
> MailWatch 
> *RBLs*: none
> *Virus Scanners*: ClamAV.
> *Volume*: 250 to 500 messages/day (through MailScanner, relayed
> messages 
> diverted)
> *Average Load: *0 to 1

This machine should be very sufficient for your load. Moreover if the
load is down then the size of the box probably is not the problem. My
guess would have been DNS problems as well. Are you running your own dns
cache?

> No problem - but I'm not 16 and this isn't school ;) - 

And no one would suggest. Personally I saw a question that led me to
believe your system is actually working more or less as expected but you
were simply misinterpreting its results. Not knowing of any other
problems and not having any more information (as to that there is a
problem at all), I - and others - did not try to help you more. 

> Worse questions have seen better answers on alt.linux.

Well then: Those guys are mindreaders. Good for them.

Do not misunderstand me: I am not trying to rant at you at all. I just
want to understand, why you were "not impressed" which means
"disappointed" I suppose. People here really do try to help especially
the ones that answered your question. 

Regards,
 JP

------------------------ MailScanner list ------------------------
To unsubscribe, email jiscmail at jiscmail.ac.uk with the words:
'leave mailscanner' in the body of the email.
Before posting, read the MAQ (http://www.mailscanner.biz/maq/) and
the archives (http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/mailscanner.html).