SpamAssassin gumming up the works

[Jason Balicki]

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First, let me apologize.  I'm rather sick and I'm running a high fever,
so much
so that I'm sure I'm probably partially incoherent and not checking obvious
stuff.

I've been running MailScanner for quite a long time, and when I've run into
this issue before it's always been a RBL going dark or something that's
causing the problem.  In this case, I don't think it is.

A little background:  yesterday, my boss called me at home (I'm at home
sick) and complained that they're getting spam delivered to the users@
email address, which is an alias for all users.  The real problem is that
the spam wasn't getting tagged as spam.

First thing's first, I hadn't upgraded MailScanner or SpamAssassin in
a while, so I got the most recent versions and started plugging away.
(MailScanner 4.39.6 and Spamassassin 3.0.2 (the tarball says
4.0.2, what's up with that?))

The problem that I've run into is that after the upgrade if I enable
Use Spamassassin = yes in my MailScanner.conf then nothing gets
delivered.  Well, I lie, if I send a few test messages through, those
get delivered, but it seems like the first piece of spam (this is
speculation)
that I get gums up the works, and after that nothing goes through until
I set Use SpamAssassin=no.   Then things come through, but, of
course, there's no spam checks being done.

Here's what I see in the logs:
Mar 12 15:29:27 mail MailScanner[25723]: Using locktype = flock
Mar 12 15:29:27 mail MailScanner[25723]: New Batch: Scanning 2 messages,
5505 bytes
Mar 12 15:29:27 mail MailScanner[25723]: MCP Checks completed at 5505
bytes per second
Mar 12 15:29:27 mail MailScanner[25723]: Spam Checks: Starting
Mar 12 15:29:31 mail MailScanner[25727]: SophosSAVI 3.91 (engine 2.28)
recognizing 101433 viruses
Mar 12 15:29:31 mail MailScanner[25727]: SophosSAVI using 85 IDE files
Mar 12 15:29:31 mail MailScanner[25735]: MailScanner E-Mail Virus
Scanner version 4.28.6 starting...
Mar 12 15:29:34 mail MailScanner[25725]: Using locktype = flock
Mar 12 15:29:34 mail MailScanner[25725]: New Batch: Scanning 2 messages,
5505 bytes
Mar 12 15:29:34 mail MailScanner[25725]: MCP Checks completed at 5505
bytes per second
Mar 12 15:29:34 mail MailScanner[25725]: Spam Checks: Starting
Mar 12 15:29:41 mail MailScanner[25737]: MailScanner E-Mail Virus
Scanner version 4.28.6 starting...

and after more messages come in:

Mar 12 15:36:06 mail MailScanner[25969]: Using locktype = flock
Mar 12 15:36:06 mail MailScanner[25969]: New Batch: Scanning 5 messages,
19152 bytes
Mar 12 15:36:06 mail MailScanner[25969]: MCP Checks completed at 19152
bytes per second
Mar 12 15:36:06 mail MailScanner[25969]: Spam Checks: Starting
Mar 12 15:36:08 mail MailScanner[25978]: MailScanner E-Mail Virus
Scanner version 4.28.6 starting...


And the number just keeps growing until I set Use SpamAssassin=no.

As I mentioned, usually this is because of an RBL going dark,
but I've set skip_rbl_checks 1 in my spam.assassin.prefs.conf
(for testing).

So, how can I trace this to find out where it's failing?  Have
I done something obviously stupid?  Is there more information I can
give to help someone help me figure this out?  Any flu remedy
recommendations?

Again, sorry if I haven't given enough information, but I'm
not thinking clearly at the moment and any and all help is
appreciated.

Thanks,

--J(K)

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