errors & procmail locking

[David Relson]

On Sun, 20 Jun 2004 14:42:16 +0200
Matthias Andree wrote:

> On Sat, 19 Jun 2004, David Relson wrote:
> 
> > Matthias,
> > 
> > Without procmail's locking the frequency of errors goes up.  The
> > most recent is below.  It shows messages arriving 2 seconds apart
> > and a couple of error/rescue sequences.
> > 
> > David
> > 
> > 
> > procmail: Opening "mail.backup"
> > procmail: [31706] Sat Jun 19 10:39:58 2004
> > procmail: Opening "mail.backup"
> > 
> > procmail: Executing "bogofilter,-p,-l,-e,-u,-U"
> > procmail: Executing "bogofilter,-p,-l,-e,-u,-U"
> > procmail: [31710] Sat Jun 19 10:40:00 2004
> > procmail: Error while writing to "bogofilter"
> > procmail: Rescue of unfiltered data succeeded
> > procmail: [31710] Sat Jun 19 10:40:00 2004
> 
> I cannot reproduce anything of this. Why does bogofilter stop
> accepting data or bail out with error?
> 
> What is -U anyway?

Matthias,

The appearance of an obvious spam in a non-spam folder caused me to look
at the headers and notice that there was no X-Bogosity line, i.e. that
the message hadn't been properly processed by bogofilter.  I then
checked the procmail log and saw the messages.

I _think_ what we're seeing here is that, without procmail locking,
bogofilter encountered a locking problem, quit, and procmail recovered
(rescued) the message.

pi suggests that, procmail might have had a problem writing to
/var/spool/mail/bogofilter.  I don't think that's what happened as file
/var/spool/mail/bogofilter is only used for messages from the bogofilter
mailing lists.  I think the "Error while writing ..." message just
includes the first word of the command in "Executing ...".

As you know, I value bogofilter's histograms.  The "-U" them to be
included when the message is classified as "unsure".

David