Strange error suddenly appears

[David Relson]

On Thu, 10 Jun 2004 13:50:25 -0700
Greg McCann wrote:

> I have had the following in my .procmailrc for several months and it
> has worked without a problem until now.  Its purpose is to
> automatically score certain trusted email as nonspam.
> 
> # to keep ham current, autoscore some trusted mail as ham
> :0c
> * 1^0 ^From: <goodguy1 at not-a-spammer.com>
> * 1^0 ^From: <goodguy2 at me-either.com>
> | bogofilter -n -d/home/bogofilter
> 
> I recently moved to a new mail server and also updated my bogofilter
> to 0.91.1.  Somehow this got broken, but nothing is logging enough
> information for me to tell what the problem is.
> 
> My procmail log says...
> 
> ...
>  Folder: bogofilter -n -d/home/bogofilter                             
>     6570
> procmail: Error while writing to "bogofilter"
> procmail: Rescue of unfiltered data succeeded
> ...
>  Folder: bogofilter -n -d/home/bogofilter                             
>     6570

> 
> /var/log/maillog says...
> 
> Jun 10 13:25:14 newnewmail sendmail[31095]: i5AKPCYW031094:
> to=<greg at cambria.com>, delay=00:00:01, xdelay=00:00:01, mailer=local,
> pri=144398, dsn=4.0.0, stat=Deferred: local mailer (/usr/bin/procmail)
> exited with EX_TEMPFAIL
> 
> 
> The same .procmailrc file also has
> 
> :0fw
> # score for spamicity
> | bogofilter -epl -d/home/bogofilter
> 
> which works fine.
> 
> And if I run "bogofilter -n -d/home/bogofilter < goodmail.txt" from
> the command line, either as root or as a nonprivileged user, I don't
> get any obvious error.
> 
> Any ideas as to why this has suddenly broken?  I have a wordlist.db
> and ignorelist.db in /home/bogofilter, both chmod 666.
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> 
> Greg McCann

Hi Greg,

The TEMPFAIL status indicates bogofilter has encountered a problem.  A
recent revision to the database open code causes trouble if there are
simultaneously running copies of bogofilter that want to open the
wordlist with write permission.  The workaround is to use procmail's
locking capability so that only one bogofilter runs at a time.  Changing
":0c" to ":0c:" (and ":0fw" to ":0fw:") should be all that's needed.

Unfortunately, I don't yet have a satisfactory fix for the problem :-<

David

-- 
David Relson                   Osage Software Systems, Inc.
relson at osagesoftware.com       Ann Arbor, MI 48103
www.osagesoftware.com          tel:  734.821.8800