New Year's Resolution and new beta release

[Julian Field]

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David Lee wrote:
> 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.)
>   
And therefore it is failing 'safe'. Why wouldn't you want it to fail 
safe? Failure resulting in message delivery sounds a whole lot better 
than failure resulting in message disposal.

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

Jules

- -- 
Julian Field MEng CITP
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