From: "Bradley Walker" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
When something goes wrong, "What did I change last?"
Of course that requires as a prerequisite making changes one at a time.
When you make two changes at once you must also ask, "How do these two
products interact?" It's no worse than managing your prescription drugs.
Hello all,
I posted on this topic back in late January to no resolution. After
spending most all of this weekend doing research, I still am at a total
loss, but do have clues on getting my problem resolved.
Just a brief history. I currently use the DirectAdmin (www.directadmin.com)
webhosting control panel on my server. When this software was installed, it
installs the Exim MTA email server along with SpamAssassin. When I
orginially setup the server on Dec. 21, 2004, DirectAdmin installed Exim
4.24 & SpamAssassin 2.55. Everything worked pefectly. SpamAssassin would
filter all the emails accordingly with the tagged subjects coming in having
been tagged by S.A. after I set the predetermined threshold level.
However, after I upgraded to Exim 4.60 & SpamAssassin 3.1.0 in December, I
experienced major major headaches of email just coming to a grinding halt.
Out of the normal 50 emails I would get per every 8 hours, only 5-10 were
sitting in my inbox. MANY customers complained that they were not getting
email, that email others were sending to them was bouncing back back with
421 Undeliverable errors.
So what you did last was update two things at once. Do you understand how
they work? Do you understand how they interact?
I did research on this and found that many others were having similiar
errors. So this weekend I decided to really sit down and detail what is
happening. First, I made sure my firewall was open to localhost traffic
using TCP on S.A.s standard port. Then I went back, completely removed Exim
4.60 and reinstalled Exim 4.24. Likewise I also went and removed
SpamAssassin 3.1.0 and reinstalled SpamAssassin 2.55. During this time, I
did keep my current exim.conf file.
So you backed off both at once. And you expect a resolution to the problem
without testing one at a time to see where the real problem lives? One
really should learn some reasonable troubleshooting techniques. What I
describe is very generic. It applies to fixing your car, your prescription
profile, your knitting practices, playing with your powered water skis,
whatever.
Immediately upon the reinstallation and starting the exim service and
running spamd -d -c -m 5 commands, everything actually worked. The logs
were showing emails were getting delievered and completed as normal. Spam
emails were getting tagged. However, within 4 hours of reinstalling those
software packages, emails start getting frozen in the Exim queue. I just
don't mean one or two emails, I'm talking well over a hundred.
What I don't get is the fact that these very same binaries worked PERFECTLY
together last year and the only thing I can say is that it's the exim.conf
file. Everything else was the same. This is becoming a huge headache for
me with customers. Many are complaining that there is little spam
protection, then on the flipside when I enable SA, their emails just don't
arrive because they get frozen away in the Exim queue. My best estimation
is that something in the latest exim.conf file is miscommunicating with
SpamAssassin. Or SpamAssassin doesn't know how to handle communication from
Exim so it's either taking too long to scan, or it's tossing the email back
to Exim saying undeliverable. Either way I need to get this resolved
quickly before mumbling customers start getting the idea of wanting money
back. See below for a copy of the header of a sample frozen email. Also I
have my exim.conf file handy for anyone who wants to see. Also the server
load on my system is non-existant. Normal load averages during the day are
like 0.01 / 0.01 / 0.01.
What is left over from the Exim 2.60 install you made? What is left over
from the SpamAssassin 3.10 install you made? If you flail away aimlessly
without understanding you may discover the combination of drugs you are
taking will kill you.
First, understand that SpamAssassin itself is not responsible for lost
anything. It does not delete emails, ever. So look to your Exim install,
which is probably hopelessly hosed at this point. It probably had, with
the initial upgrade, a rule that deleted mail that SpamAssassin marked
as spam. At this point I'd discuss your problems with the Exim folks.
We don't do Exim here. Some of us merely use it. And maybe there is an
Exim expert here. But he's here for SpamAssassin. If you DO get an Exim
expert to answer you in here be very pleased with his taking the time.
{^_^} Yes, she did get up on the wrong side of the bed to day.
