New Year's Resolution and new beta release

David Lee t.d.lee at durham.ac.uk
Fri Jan 5 11:39:26 CET 2007


On Thu, 4 Jan 2007, Julian Field wrote:

> [...]
> My New Year's Resolution is to try to spend more time doing MailScanner
> support. For the last 6 months I have only had time to check my
> mailscanner at ecs.soton.ac.uk address, not the mailing lists at all.
>
> [...]
> Secondly, I have just released a new Beta version. This is 4.58.4.
>
> [...]
> I intend to release a new Stable version very soon, hopefully in the
> next week or so. Please do test the new {Fraud?} tag code and give the
> whole thing a good run on any test hosts you may have available.
> [...]

Julian: Just before Christmas there was a thread about checking return
codes from system calls.  The consensus seemed to be that MS had the
balance about right: checking those that were likely to fail, but not
being too paranoid about those that were either extremely unlikely or had
not occured in anyone's real experience.  That's fine with me.

But (hah! there's always a "but" isn't there?)...

Could you check, please, the report from November:
   http://lists.mailscanner.info/pipermail/mailscanner/2006-November/067706.html

which is part of thread:
   http://lists.mailscanner.info/pipermail/mailscanner/2006-November/067415.html

This is (presumably) rare for others, but it has been, and still is, real
for us. That is, it falls into the "occurs in real experience" category.
(I'm surviving by using a suboptimal fudge around the problem.)


Brief summary: "MailScanner/SA.pm" does a fork()/exec() to SpamAssassin.
If, for some reason, that SA crashes then the parent (MS) process seems
not to detect this, and treats it as a good, 'ham' result.  (I give
possible suggestions in that November email.)

Hope you are able to look into this.  I would be happy to try to beta-test
your fix.  Thanks.

Best wishes.


-- 

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