Not often I post

[Steve Freegard]

Hi Karl,

On Thu, 2006-03-30 at 23:02 +0100, Karl Bailey wrote:
> Only when I have a problem, which I seem to at the moment. Two day in
> a row now I have had a problem with MailScanner 4.51.5-1 running in
> RedHat FC1. It employs spam assassin, kaspersky, f-prot & mcafee virus
> scanning. CPU usage etc hovers around 25% & all in all it works very
> well processing around 20000 messages (6GBytes) a day.
> 
>  
> 
> I have received a single message that brings mailscanner to it’s
> knees .. the message enters the inbound mail queue, the MailScanner
> processes defunct one by one till MailScanner is effectively not
> processing mail any more, mail builds up in the inbound mail queue.
> This is exasperated by the fact that although MailScanner reports as
> defunct in the process list it is actually still identifying spam, &
> generating spam warning messages, which in turn end up in the inbound
> queue… this seems to lead to a “DOS” effect. 
> 
>  
> 
> I have isolated the single message in it’s raw queue qf & df files.
> Every time I place it into the inbound queue the processes defunct, &
> yes I am ensuring there is no file permissions problems… If anyone
> wants a copy of the message I can send them the queue files…. I’m
> suspicious though that the Virus Scanning is where the problem lies,
> hence without the combination of VC’s listed above it may run through
> the queue … Any ideas? The one thing I’ve noticed about the header (qf
> file) is that there seems to be some very long boundary strings
> emplyed.
> 

We had a number of customers with exactly the same problem on 4.51.5 -
an upgrade to 4.51.6 solved the problem for them.

Kind regards,
Steve.

-- 
Steve Freegard
Development Director
Fort Systems Ltd.
Tel:    +44 (0)1243 200 001
Mobile: +44 (0)7740 364 348
Skype:  smfreegard