Problem with HTML messages and MailScanner 4.47.4

YAN yan at NEVERNEVERLAND.F9.CO.UK
Mon Nov 14 18:08:20 GMT 2005


I have been using MailScanner 4.43.8 for a while without any problems and
decided to upgrade to 4.47.4.

The first upgrade attempt was not done using the install.sh script, instead
I just extracted the MailScanner-4.47.4-2.tar.gz from the perl directory of
the MailScanner-install-4.47.4-2.tar.gz and edited the conf files for my
system. I changed the MailScanner symlink in /opt to reflect the new version
and the problem started.

If the format of mail entering my MailScanner box is text or rich text then
it is processed and delivered correctly. If the format is html then I get
the following in my /var/log/maillog

Nov 12 16:11:12 beckham MailScanner[5232]: MailScanner E-Mail Virus Scanner
version 4.47.4 starting... 
Nov 12 16:11:12 beckham MailScanner[5083]: New Batch: Scanning 1 messages,
1459 bytes 
Nov 12 16:11:12 beckham MailScanner[5232]: Read 680 hostnames from the
phishing whitelist 
Nov 12 16:11:12 beckham MailScanner[5232]: Config: calling custom init
function SQLBlacklist 
Nov 12 16:11:12 beckham MailScanner[5232]: Starting up SQL Blacklist 
Nov 12 16:11:13 beckham MailScanner[5232]: Read 2986 blacklist entries 
Nov 12 16:11:13 beckham MailScanner[5232]: Config: calling custom init
function MailWatchLogging 
Nov 12 16:11:13 beckham MailScanner[5232]: Started SQL Logging child 
Nov 12 16:11:13 beckham MailScanner[5232]: Config: calling custom init
function SQLWhitelist 
Nov 12 16:11:13 beckham MailScanner[5232]: Starting up SQL Whitelist 
Nov 12 16:11:13 beckham MailScanner[5232]: Read 13 whitelist entries 
Nov 12 16:11:13 beckham MailScanner[5232]: Using locktype = flock 

This is repeated continually but the html message(s) never actually get
processed or delivered. I have MailScanner set to have 5 processes but when
html messages are encountered, the running processes seem to spawn new
MailScanner processes. Some of these processes seem to die and leave the
following in /var/log/messages

Nov 13 18:05:53 beckham root: Process did not exit cleanly, returned 255
with signal 0 
Nov 13 18:11:38 beckham root: Process did not exit cleanly, returned 9 with
signal 0

This will continue until I manually move the 'stuck' html emails from
/var/spool/mqueue.in at which point the logging stops and the MailScanner
processes return to normal (until a new html message is received).

Since the initial install I have ran the install.sh script to ensure that no
perl dependencies are missing, which completes without error but I still
cant process html emails. At this point the problem gets even weirder....

This particular MailScanner box is a semi-production box so until a fix
could be found I tried to revert back to the last known working install of
MailScanner, namely 4.43.8. This version has now also developed the dislike
of html emails. Other than the attempted upgrade of MailScanner, nothing
else has been changed on the box. It only acts as a MailScanner and nobody
else has access to it to be able to change/install anything without my
knowledge.

As I was now having the same problem with both versions I decided to persist
with the newer version (4.47.4). Debug shows the same log entries shown
above and doesn't show any further information. I can force MailScanner
4.47.4 to process html emails by using Scan Messages = no (obviously this
doesn't do any scanning) but the html emails are then processed and
delivered.

I cant seem to find what is causing this issue and hope that someone may
have seen this before or be able to point me in the right direction to fix
it.

Details of the box are:

FreeBSD 4.10-RELEASE
Perl v5.8.2
Sendmail v 8.12.11

Any help/ideas will be greatly appreciated and further information will be
supplied if needed.

Regards

Yan

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