MailScanner, SpamAssassin and Bayes rebuilds

[Pierre Thomson <Pi...@bruderhof.com>]

I just upgraded to MailScanner 4.46.2 (current stable version) and SpamAssassin 3.1.0.  I have five MailScanner child processes, and they restart themselves every 4 hours.

On startup, the first of the five MS processes discovers that a Bayes rebuild is due, and proceeds to run it.  Thereafter, that thread gets SA timeouts almost every time, and after the limit of consecutive SA timeouts is reached it just passes everything.   Needless to say, we had a spammy weekend.

Anyone else seeing this sort of behavior?  Any suggestions?  For now, I have turned off automatic Bayes rebuilds, and it seems to be working OK...

thanks
Pierre Thomson
BIC

Re: MailScanner, SpamAssassin and Bayes rebuilds

[Dhawal Doshy <dh...@netmagicsolutions.com>]

Pierre Thomson wrote:
> I just upgraded to MailScanner 4.46.2 (current stable version) and SpamAssassin 3.1.0.  I have five MailScanner child processes, and they restart themselves every 4 hours.
> 
> On startup, the first of the five MS processes discovers that a Bayes rebuild is due, and proceeds to run it.  Thereafter, that thread gets SA timeouts almost every time, and after the limit of consecutive SA timeouts is reached it just passes everything.   Needless to say, we had a spammy weekend.
> 
> Anyone else seeing this sort of behavior?  Any suggestions?  For now, I have turned off automatic Bayes rebuilds, and it seems to be working OK...
> 
> thanks
> Pierre Thomson
> BIC
> 

Expire tokens through a cronjob rather than using the controls in 
mailscanner, and see if it makes a difference (not that i recommend 
doing this but it's worth a try.)

Something like:
sa-learn --force-expire --sync -p /path/to/spam.assassin.prefs.conf

Also shoot off a mail to the mailscanner list and find out what is the 
recommended method for rebuilds.

- dhawal

Re: MailScanner, SpamAssassin and Bayes rebuilds

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

Hi,

Turn off automatic Bayes rebuilds, and run a rebuild once a day using 
sa-learn.

For example on *nix I use the following:

/usr/local/bin/sa-learn --force-expire

Which is run via cron once a day during the wee small hours.


> I just upgraded to MailScanner 4.46.2 (current stable version) and
> SpamAssassin 3.1.0.  I have five MailScanner child processes, and they
> restart themselves every 4 hours.
> 
> On startup, the first of the five MS processes discovers that a Bayes
> rebuild is due, and proceeds to run it.  Thereafter, that thread gets
> SA timeouts almost every time, and after the limit of consecutive SA
> timeouts is reached it just passes everything.   Needless to say, we
> had a spammy weekend.
> 
> Anyone else seeing this sort of behavior?  Any suggestions?  For now,
> I have turned off automatic Bayes rebuilds, and it seems to be working
> OK...
> 
> thanks
> Pierre Thomson
> BIC
> 
> 


-- 
Anthony Peacock       
CHIME, Royal Free & University College Medical School
WWW:    http://www.chime.ucl.ac.uk/~rmhiajp/
"It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was 
my age, he had been dead for two years." - Tom Lehrer