spamassassin failure causing mail bounces

[theWoosh <na...@andystokes.com>]

Hi - I have a server (mail & web) set up with spamassassin 3.1.9 installed
with postfix 2.45 on Red Hat 4.1.2-13 kernel 2.6.22.14-72.fc6 

3 users of the server I manage are having all incoming emails bounced with
the following:

temporary failure. Command output: procmail: Program failure (-25) of
"/usr/bin/spamassassin" procmail: Rescue of unfiltered data succeeded
procmail: Error while writing to "" procmail: Error while writing to
"/var/mail/lynn.<domain-name>"

(I have replaced the domain name with <domain-name> here) 
When I look at cpu use using top it appears that between them, spamassassin
processes are taking up around 98% of processor use... 
Any ideas why spamassassin should be failing? I couldn't locate an
explanation for error 25 - in the maillog the above error message is
appearing every few hundredths of a second - is spamassassin just not able
to cope with what might be a massive spam attack? 

I can see that there is also a subsidiary problem that procmail seems to be
trying to save the emails to the wrong directory when spamassassin fails -
it should be going to /home/<domain>/homes/lynn in this case (but this is
not so much of a problem)...

ANy help would be gratefully recieve 
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Re: spamassassin failure causing mail bounces

[theWoosh <na...@andystokes.com>]

/etc/postxix/main had mailbox_size_limit set to 11 megs - can't believe this
is the default! All 3 users are on holiday, so this is the first time this
limit had been reached...

upped it to half a gig and now the mail is getting through....
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Re: spamassassin failure causing mail bounces

[Martin Gregorie <ma...@gregorie.org>]

On Wed, 2008-08-13 at 06:24 -0700, theWoosh wrote:
> /etc/postfix/main had mailbox_size_limit set to 11 megs
>
That isn't a default value: the Postfix default is 51200000, 50 MB. The
mailbox_size_limit parameter is not defined in the default main.cf for
the current version of Postfix (2.4.5) so if it was present then
somebody has set it deliberately. 

Another thought: if procmail is copying incoming mail into a mailbox in
the user's home directory and you're enforcing user filestore quotas
then that mailbox could overflow the quota and cause a procmail error. 

Martin

Re: spamassassin failure causing mail bounces

[Duane Hill <d....@yournetplus.com>]

On Wed, 13 Aug 2008, theWoosh wrote:

>
> /etc/postfix/main had mailbox_size_limit set to 11 megs - can't believe this
> is the default! All 3 users are on holiday, so this is the first time this
> limit had been reached...
>
> upped it to half a gig and now the mail is getting through....

11 messages? They must have been pretty large. The default 
mailbox_size_limit is 512000000 Kb as distributed from the Postfix web 
site.

-d

Re: spamassassin failure causing mail bounces

[theWoosh <na...@andystokes.com>]

/etc/postfix/main had mailbox_size_limit set to 11 megs - can't believe this
is the default! All 3 users are on holiday, so this is the first time this
limit had been reached...

upped it to half a gig and now the mail is getting through....
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Re: spamassassin failure causing mail bounces

[Karsten Bräckelmann <gu...@rudersport.de>]

Diverting from the original question...

> Spamassassin is now down to  *ONLY* 45% of cpu or thereabouts...

Use spamc/spamd!

According to your OP, you are calling spamassassin, forking a new
heavy-weight process for each mail. This comes with a considerable
start-up penalty. You can get rid of this and lower your machines load,
for trading off some memory.

> .... they get a LOT of spam :-)

Probably not. ;)  With a lot of spam, using spamassassin rather than
spamd would fry your server.

IMHO, anyone who feels the need for SA (as opposed to some small-scale,
usually Bayes-only client side filtering) also needs a more
sophisticated method than plain 'spamassassin' calling per mail.

  guenther


-- 
char *t="\10pse\0r\0dtu\0.@ghno\x4e\xc8\x79\xf4\xab\x51\x8a\x10\xf4\xf4\xc4";
main(){ char h,m=h=*t++,*x=t+2*h,c,i,l=*x,s=0; for (i=0;i<l;i++){ i%8? c<<=1:
(c=*++x); c&128 && (s+=h); if (!(h>>=1)||!t[s+h]){ putchar(t[s]);h=m;s=0; }}}

Re: spamassassin failure causing mail bounces

[theWoosh <na...@andystokes.com>]

Hi, thanks for your response...
I didn't set the limit so maybe it was set by default when procmail was
installed - can't remember if it came pre-configured or not (maybe it was
done via CP+ ?)

I am not setting quotas on any of the mail users, so this should not be a
problem I hope

Spamassassin is now down to  *ONLY* 45% of cpu or thereabouts...

.... they get a LOT of spam :-)

Cheers
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