Weird Problem with MailScanner

[Randal, Phil]

That would perhaps coincide with the demise of the completewhois rbl.
 
If your version of spamassassin uses completewhois, try adding the
following to spam.assassin.prefs.conf:
 
score __RCVD_IN_WHOIS 0

score RCVD_IN_WHOIS_INVALID 0

score URIBL_COMPLETEWHOIS 0

Cheers.

Phil

--
Phil Randal
Network Engineer
Herefordshire Council
Hereford, UK 

 


________________________________

	From: mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info
[mailto:mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info] On Behalf Of Damian
Rivas
	Sent: 19 October 2007 17:22
	To: mailscanner at lists.mailscanner.info
	Subject: Weird Problem with MailScanner
	
	
	Hi there, I'm having a really weird problem and as I am a n00b
it gets a bit more difficult to find a solution. 
	 
	I'll explain the details first:
	 
	Since 6 months ago, I am the System Administrator of a Tourism
Agency. We use an E-mail Scanner in a server with the following
characteristics:
	 
	Processor: Pentium II 233 Mhz.
	RAM: 128 MB
	OS: Linux Slackware 9
	MailScanner version: 4.55.10
	 
	This E-mail Scanner use the MailScanner with Sophos Antivirus
and Spam Assasin to filter spam and scan incoming and outcoming mails
for viruses which are then redirected to an internal MS Exchange Server
or to the Internet, respectively by sendmail.
	 
	One month ago, the server started behaving erratically. Instead
of checking and sending mails as it normally did, it started queueing
mails massively and therefore accumulating great quantities of them, it
got up to 10000 mails queued up in a single day, therefore, no one
recieved a single mail. After many pointless attempts to repair this
problem and seeing that the Travel Agents were getting a bit mad, I
decided to redirect the MX server of our domains in the DNS to the
firewall, so that our E-Mail Scanner server didn't recieve more mail,
which was only going to contribute to making the problem worse, more
incoming mails, more queued mails.
	 
	With this, the server started sending the queued mails and mail
traffic was restored with the difference that mails weren't scanned at
all(they were no longer passing through the MailScanner Server). When
the mail queues were empty again, I tried to reestablish the scanning
service, but the problem appeared again.
	 
	I don't have a clear idea of what can be causing this problem.
The machine is pretty old, but the former administrator told me that it
had never had problems. I think that perhaps we are being Spam Bombed
and perhaps the System poor processing capabilities cannot resists the
increasing traffic and therefore it gets stuck and keeps enqueueing
mails.
	 
	Please if anyone can guide me I'll appreciate it,
	Sorry if my English is a bit rusty, it is not my native
language, therefore if you need me to be more clear or try to give more
details of something, don't hesitate to ask so.
	Thanks in advance!