Mailscanner failing to restart

[Richard Savage]

Hi

We are running Mailscanner on Debian 8.9 as follows:

MailWatch Version: 1.2.2
MailScanner Version: 5.0.3
ClamAV Version:
SpamAssassin Version: 3.4.1
PHP Version: 5.6.30-0+deb8u1
MySQL Version: 5.6.37-log
GeoIP Database Version: Thu, 04 May 2017 10:43:12 +0100 (download date)
GeoIPv6 Database Version: Thu, 04 May 2017 10:43:12 +0100 (download date)

Upon updating /etc/MailScanner/rules/spam.whitelist.rules or 
/etc/MailScanner/rules/spam.blacklist.rules and then restarting 
Mailscanner it crashes most times and the only way to get it back 
running again is to reboot the whole box:

root at mta01:~# /etc/init.d/mailscanner restart
Restarting MailScanner ...
Can't locate strict.pm: /usr/share/MailScanner/perl/strict.pm: 
Permission denied at /usr/sbin/MailScanner line 27.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/sbin/MailScanner line 27.
MailScanner restarted with process id 12992
root at mta01:~# reboot

Is this a known issue or yet to be fixed?

Any help to fix this would be great as rebooting the box all the time is 
not ideal......

Thanks

Rich