spamassassin --debug scoring different from live score

[frank jones <ab...@hotmail.com>]

I've got a gentoo linux machine running qmail with Spamassassin 3.1.8 with 
spamd/spamc/clamav/qmail-scanner and maildrop. Our setup is for one domain 
and we're getting about 500-1000 real emails per day and about 7000-10000 
spams per day.

The setup is pretty good, but I've got this feeling that something isn't set 
up quite right. We get quite a few false positives, probably due to the fact 
that I have the threshold set pretty low (3.5 and higher is considered spam, 
but maildrop grabs anything over 2.0 and puts it into a suspicious folder). 
Also, sometimes an address that is whitelist_from doesn't get the massively 
negative score that it should. Every time I change local.cf, or modify my 
rule file, I restart spamd. I assume that's all I need to do.

Yesterday I started using my own rule file because there were quite a few 
obvious drug spams that slipped through with a score close to zero. I 
created a couple of rules and put the file in /etc/spamassassin which is 
where my rules seem to be. I then restarted spamd. Some of the spams were 
caught but some kept slipping through. So I isolated one of the slips into a 
separate file (in pine I put it into it's own folder, then from the command 
line I copied the folder into a file called spam.eml and edited out the 
first few lines that say something like "this is data needed to maintain 
this mailbox" and also edited out the spamassassin added lines). Then I ran 
spamassassin --debug on it and it scored  the mail properly (matching my 
rule). Then I ran spamc from the command line and got the same result. Is 
there any reason that the command line run would give a different score than 
the live install?

Here's the spamassassin lines from each run:

Header lines of the email after it came through:

Received: from 72.14.214.234 by localhost (envelope-from 
<an...@gmail.com>,
    uid 201) with qmail-scanner-1.25st
(clamdscan: 0.88.7/2880. spamassassin: 3.1.8. perlscan: 1.25st.
Clear:RC:0(72.14.214.234):SA:0(0.9/3.5):.
Processed in 8.178122 secs); 21 Mar 2007 00:29:18 -0000
X-Spam-Status: No, hits=0.9 required=3.5

Header lines from:
spamassassin --debug < debug/spam.eml > debug/spam.out

X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.1.8 (2007-02-13) on localhost
X-Spam-Level: ***
X-Spam-Status: No, score=3.0 required=3.5 tests=HTML_MESSAGE,JASON_VIAG2,
        UNPARSEABLE_RELAY autolearn=no version=3.1.8

Header lines from:
spamc < debug/spam.eml > debug/spamc.out

X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.1.8 (2007-02-13) on localhost
X-Spam-Level: ***
X-Spam-Status: No, score=3.0 required=3.5 tests=HTML_MESSAGE,JASON_VIAG2,
        UNPARSEABLE_RELAY autolearn=no version=3.1.8

Thanks.

-Frank

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