Spamassassin timeouts - Just an observation

Kai Schaetzl maillists at conactive.com
Thu Jan 15 14:50:28 GMT 2009


I don't have the beginning of this thread anymore. 
Do you get a lot of "Spamassassin timed out. Try n of 20." in your 
*Mailscanner* log? (I didn't quote that warning message literally, I hope 
you find it nevertheless.)

I think you didn't post a "spamassassin -D --lint" yet. May I suggest you 
put a text file with this up somewhere (not here), so others can have a 
look?

If you are getting DNS timeouts there are only a few probable reasons:

- the machine has a performance problem, e.g. the sheer processing takes so 
long that it times out, no matter if the remote RBL replied fast or not
(this would be the least probable)

- there is somewhere a nameserver/resolution problem along the line (this 
can include problems that are added by other software, for instance 
firewall)

- the resolver software (be it the Perl module or the resolver stack of the 
OS) has a problem

Have you tried checking the RBLs that seem to timeout more often *manually* 
and repeatedly?

> I'm still fighting this thing. I don't really see anything specific when 
> running debug.

no RBL timeouts?

> What is the best way to set all scores to zero for the RBLs? I had 
> considered making a copy of 20_dnsbl_tests.cf  just to get a list of all 
> the RBLs, and modifying it to just include "score" for all of them and 
> putting them in my local.cf or spam.assassin.prefs.conf.file, but is 
> this the proper way?

skip_rbl_checks already switches all none URIBL dns checks off. If you do 
like you supposed you would be able to switch the rest of them off. 
However, if you clearly see that RBL timeouts are happening excessively you 
want to rather fix that instead of switching it all off. At the moment it 
seems to me that *you* are not sure yet if the problem relates from dns 
timeouts or not. However, from all I remember that seems to be your problem 
indeed.

Kai

-- 
Kai Schätzl, Berlin, Germany
Get your web at Conactive Internet Services: http://www.conactive.com





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