BF + procmail fails ungracefully

[Greg McCann]

I'm still on an older version of BF (0.93.5), so my apologies if this issue has already been addressed.

The other day I accidentally deleted my personal wordlist.db file.  This, of course, made Bogofilter unhappy.  Its cries of distress were silently recorded in my procmail log as follows:

============================
Can't open file '/home/greg/wordlist.db' in directory '/home/bogofilter'.
error #2 - No such file or directory.

Remember to register some spam and ham messages before you
use bogofilter to evaluate mail for its probable spam status!
procmail: Error while writing to "bogofilter"
procmail: Rescue of unfiltered data succeeded
============================

This resulted in a lot of email being deferred, unbeknownst to me.  Because some of my email bypasses bogofilter I didn't figure out that anything was wrong for almost 24 hours.  I thought I was just having a slow email day!

It seems that having mail delivery fail just because Bogofilter is out of sorts is a bit of an overreaction.  I would rather receive un-bogofiltered mail than nothing at all.  I'm wondering if it would be possible for bogofilter to handle failure a tad more gracefully.  Instead of failing silently (other than the procmail log entries which might go unnoticed for some time) and delaying mail delivery, why not let the mail go through, and perhaps add a warning to the subject line?

Best regards,


Greg McCann