Scan Messages according to arrival

[leemansvg <mi...@usd465.com>]

Hello,

I don't know if anyone has come across this, but my
Mailscanner/spamasssasin/sendmail bunch seems to scan messages  randomly. I
noticed this because it once got behind on scanning mail and it started to
scan the ones that came in immediately first. Is there a setting that I
tweak for it to adopt the policy "first in, first out" ?

Mike.
-- 
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Scan-Messages-according-to-arrival-tf2757348.html#a7688534
Sent from the SpamAssassin - Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

Re: Scan Messages according to arrival

[Anthony Peacock <a....@chime.ucl.ac.uk>]

Hi,

leemansvg wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I don't know if anyone has come across this, but my
> Mailscanner/spamasssasin/sendmail bunch seems to scan messages  randomly. I
> noticed this because it once got behind on scanning mail and it started to
> scan the ones that came in immediately first. Is there a setting that I
> tweak for it to adopt the policy "first in, first out" ?

You might be better off asking this on the MailScanner users mailing 
list.  http://www.mailscanner.info/support.html#mailing

How large was the queue when it started to process 'randomly'?

Mailscanner normally processes the incoming queue in batches in FIFO 
order.  But it has a setting that if the queue size exceeds the 
configured value it reverts to a more oppurtunistic processing mode.

 From the docs:

"Max Normal Queue Size

  If more messages are found in the queue than this, then switch to an
  "accelerated" mode of processing messages. This will cause it to stop
  scanning messages in strict date order, but in the order it finds them
  in the queue. If your queue is bigger than this size a lot of the time,
  then some messages could be greatly delayed. So treat this option as
  "in emergency only"."

This defaults to 800.

As the docs say, if this happens regularly you can raise this value to 
keep the FIFO behaviour.  But if your incoming queue is regularly 
backing up that much you probably should look at why.

-- 
Anthony Peacock
CHIME, Royal Free & University College Medical School
WWW:    http://www.chime.ucl.ac.uk/~rmhiajp/
"If you have an apple and I have  an apple and we  exchange apples
then you and I will still each have  one apple. But  if you have an
idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us
will have two ideas." -- George Bernard Shaw