RE: Start it up

[Brian Hamlin <ca...@yahoo.com>]

I am putting along with Perl. I just wrote a script
that loops through my mail, reads a msgs, sends it to
SA, then writes it out to a nw mbox. When it is done,
it copies the new mbox into the system one.

* horribly slow
* will miss mails
* mayeb I made more mistakes
  but it is better than the alternative at the moment

ideas still welcome.  
  -Brian

ps- yes, I am just a user here.. If I had somethin
gvery specific to ask an admin, maybe I could get them
to do it for me..  I am not sure what that might be in
terms of the filter account, but I appreciate the
cycles...


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Re: Start it up

[Loren Wilton <lw...@earthlink.net>]

>   Now, (it seems, cross fingers) magically the
> /var/mail/userxxx file is being kept small by
> something. The rates of spamassassin marked headers

> was getting 8000+ msgs a day through to me. We shall
> see what the new rates are, but it looks a _lot_
> better.

I suspect that you had managed to get a huge AWL or Bayes database, and SA
was trying to do an expire run on almost every mail processed.  This would
exceed a time limit somewhere in the processing chain, and SA would get
killed.  Then procmail or whatever is calling SA would pass the message
through unmarked.  The next mail -- same thing happens.

If you can manually run SA and can access the Bayes DB, then you can in all
probability manually do an expire run at midnight with a cron job or the
like.  Then you could turn off the option to do automatic expirations and
just handle them manually.  YOu seem to be getting enough mail that this
might be worthwhile anyway.

        Loren

Re: Start it up

[Brian Hamlin <ca...@yahoo.com>]

  just a quick note of good news. It seems something
is changing in the behavior of procmail/spamassassin
on the server for me.. Here is what I did over the
last 5 days as a user, no admin privs...

in $HOME/.spamassassin
-rm'd a lock file on the autowhitelist from 30 days
ago 
-cleared auto-whitelist.dir, auto-whitelist.pag
  (right or wrong, I did it, emptied, not rm)
- exported and reimported the bayes DB via db_load

erased the 700mb+ /var/mail/userxxx file (all mail)
cleared the procmail log (which was also huge, yrs), 
 
manually called spamassassin programmatically a bunch
of times, sometimes in debug mode, and with lint,

then, added whitelist to/from to my user_prefs, along
with a couple of minor user_prefs tweaks.

  Now, (it seems, cross fingers) magically the
/var/mail/userxxx file is being kept small by
something. The rates of spamassassin marked headers
getting to my desktop client are much, much higher. I
can't say how often SA was being called previously,
but it seemed negligable. And my user_prefs changes
are being reflected in the SA tests.

Solaris / SunOS 5.8
Spam assassin 2.6

was getting 8000+ msgs a day through to me. We shall
see what the new rates are, but it looks a _lot_
better.

thanks to Stuart for a couple of thoughts in my dire
predicament

hth 
signing off -Brian


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Re: Start it up

[Stuart Johnston <st...@ebby.com>]

Brian Hamlin wrote:
> I am putting along with Perl. I just wrote a script
> that loops through my mail, reads a msgs, sends it to
> SA, then writes it out to a nw mbox. When it is done,
> it copies the new mbox into the system one.
> 
> * horribly slow
> * will miss mails
> * mayeb I made more mistakes
>   but it is better than the alternative at the moment
> 
> ideas still welcome.  
>   -Brian
> 
> ps- yes, I am just a user here.. If I had somethin
> gvery specific to ask an admin, maybe I could get them
> to do it for me..  I am not sure what that might be in
> terms of the filter account, but I appreciate the
> cycles...

Normally, you would run a new message through SA before it gets to your 
mailbox.  If you need to do this at the user level (rather than in the 
MTA) the common method is with procmail:

http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/UsedViaProcmail

You can pass a whole mailbox to spamassassin with the --mbox option but 
you are still going to have the problem of overwriting an active mailbox 
file and possibly loosing mail.  Procmail would be a better way to go 
for future mail.