Hallo!
Just wanted to throw in an observation on my system's behaviour with
spamassassin 'overloaded'.... Not really a complaint, as I know what I
did 'wrong'. But curious about one of the effects....
During the recent run of image spams, I tried a couple of different
pieces of code that involved 'full' tests. I knew they would slow things
down a bit, but they had an unexpected side-effect: Various people on my
system, including myself, started to receive duplicates for some mail.
Particularly *list* mails like the sa list, or yahoo groups.
At first I didn't associate this behaviour with SA because the duplicates
were being sent by the originating system, not from within mine. I
wasn't even certain that the fault was mine, given the way it mostly
seemed to occur with certain list servers. The mail was getting delivered
to my local recipient, but the sending system was resending a few minutes
later (and would do so three or four times).
Yes, I have my spamassassin in my SMTP front end, so I figured out that
the timing of the appearance of these duplicates coincided with my adding
those 'full' tests, and when I removed them, the duplicates stopped.
So obviously some systems were 'timing out' waiting for my server to
respond to the DATA command. But I am slightly curious as to why this only
happens with mailing lists... Do yahoo and python.org enforce a shorter
time-out? Or does some characteristic of list mail make it take longer to
process in sa?
- Charles
