SpamAssassin timed out and was killed

[Matt Kettler]

Paul Welsh wrote:
> Hi Everyone
> 
> I've been getting this old chestnut all day today.  The time outs are pretty
> regular; every 5 minutes, but a lot of spam is still getting tagged.
> 
> I've restarted named.
> 
> I've checked that I can dig without it taking a long time.

Do you use bayes? If so, this is a common problem. SA is busy doing bayes
cleanup chores (expiring old tokens), and MS thinks it's hung up.

either:
1) change your SA timeout to something on the order of 3 hours

2) or do both of the following:
-add bayes_auto_expire 0 to your /etc/mail/spamassassin/mailscanner.cf
-create a cron-job to run sa-learn --force-expire as a user that has your same
bayes database access.

Or both.

Personally, I do both.

I do 1) because I've *never* had a spamassassin instance get hung up, ever. But
I've had lots of situations where MS killed it errantly. So, to me the timeout
here has proven itself occasionally troublesome, but not yet proven itself
useful. That said, I do still keep it enabled so should one ever actually hang
up it will eventually be detected.

I do 2) so I can have control over when the bayes expire run happens. This is a
good thing to run in off-hours because it is kind of disk i/o intensive.