spam getting through without even being checked

[Chris Yuzik]

Hi Andy,

Thanks for getting on this issue. Perhaps together and with the help of 
the gurus on this mailing list we can crack this problem.

Andy Norris wrote:
> Yes, Chris, this is the problem I'm having with Ensim / MailScanner 
> right now. Are you getting tons of sendmail processes running?
Yes! Several sendmail processes running. Also, high server load (7 to 
10) during peak times of the day.
> If I stop sendmail, like I'm supposed to for MailScanner, MailScanner 
> does, indeed, start the instances of sendmail that it needs for 
> pushing the mail to the mailboxes. However, I cannot sent mail from my 
> email client through the server, as there's no connection (nothing 
> listening on port 25). So I have to be running sendmail, and 
> MailScanner is only scanning the mail it gets around to before other 
> sendmail processes deliver it without scanning.
That's interesting. If I stop sendmail and MailScanner, then start only 
MailScanner, I don't see anything that indicates that sendmail has 
started up. Since it's a live server, I have to be particularly careful 
about when I experiment with this stuff since we have hundreds of users 
relying on this machine.
> Also, when shutting down sendmail, the 
> /home/virtual/FILESYSTEMTEMPLATE/services/sendmail/mqueue directory 
> gets backed up with a lot of mail... then when starting sendmail again 
> -- because I have to! -- it takes a lot of time to get that mail out 
> the door. In fact, there is mail in that directory from a couple days 
> ago, and I need to figure out how to get sendmail to deal with all 
> that. Is that directory filling up for you, as well?
The directory only fills up during peak times of the day for me, but it 
eventually clears itself out. If you type "mailq" does it list these 
stuck messages for you?

At peak times of the day, it can take upwards of 20 minutes for a 
message to go through our server; at other times it's less than 15 
seconds. A couple of minutes is acceptable, but to me > 5 minutes is not.
> Seems that just recently things have started going more haywire. Don't 
> know if it's just that we're being pounded by spammers or what.
I second that. About 6 weeks to a couple of months ago, we had no 
issues. Peak times of day were only few minutes for email to go through. 
We haven't changed anything. Not sure what's going on here.
> It would be great if we could share anything we might find to get to 
> where we need to be!
I concur. In the years I've been on this mailing list, I have found 
nothing but excellent information supplied by some of the top people in 
their various industries. MailScanner has been, and continues to be, the 
absolute pinnacle of what open source software and the community that 
uses and supports it can be.

I am curious what might be different about your MailScanner.conf file 
and mine. Why does yours start sendmail and mine doesn't...Can you list 
the lines that start with "sendmail" from your conf file? Also, what 
version of Ensim and MailScanner are you running? What do you see when 
you type "service MailScanner start" (assuming it's stopped)? Do you see 
any reference to sendmail?

Let's get this nut cracked and get back to the levels of spam filtering 
we used to have.

Chris