Spamassassin cache loop

[Stephen Swaney]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info [mailto:mailscanner-
> bounces at lists.mailscanner.info] On Behalf Of Knut Bjornstad
> Sent: Monday, May 08, 2006 8:48 AM
> To: mailscanner at lists.mailscanner.info
> Subject: Spamassassin cache loop
> 
> We have a problem with our MailScanner installations - a small part of
> the traffic get stuck in the Spamassassin cache and loops back to
> the hold queue for reprossessing. This happens to ordinary mail, I am
> not sure if any of them is spam. The loop is not infinite thou, most of
> the cases escape after a few hundred iterations. But there are som mails
> that has been stuck for months.
> 
> We have quite a lot of mail going through our MailScanner filters, so I
> have not given this attention before the last days. But the load on the
> boxes (we have several running in parallell), kept increasing very
> slowly. I was not able to reset the cache in any way. My knowledge of
> SQLite and sql bases in general are very limited, but at last I managed
> to reset the base on one of the boxes by overwriting it with an empty
> base!
> This had no effect, the looping continued. At last I stopped it by
> removing the
> offending mails from the hold queue. Then the load (as reported by
> uptime) on the boxes fell immediately.
> 
> Here is some obeservations I have made:
> The log gets lines like this:
> "May  8 00:08:04 xxxx MailScanner[882]: SpamAssassin cache hit for
> message A3C3B310132.D0C33" where the last part of the session-id varies
> as the mail is put back in the hold queue
> 
> I have found no particular type of mail that gets caught - but all of them
> have
> a few MIME components.
> 
> When I remove a mail, and then put it back in the hold queue, without
> any modification, it got sent immidiately!
> 
> Our installation:
> postfix postfix-2.2.1 and 2.1.5 on Suse Linux (the behaviour occurs on
> both versions)
> MailScanner 4.50.15
> spamassassin 3.0.4
> ClamAV 0.88.1
> 
> I wonder if this problem can be rectified by upgrading MailScanner, or
> by changing the cache parameters (but the config comment says you
> shouldn't ordinarily do this)
> 
> I would appreciate any comment.
> --

I believe this is a known problem which can be fixed by upgrading.

Steve

Stephen Swaney
Fort Systems Ltd.
stephen.swaney at fsl.com
www.fsl.com