errors & procmail locking

[David Relson]

On Sun, 20 Jun 2004 16:06:52 +0200
Matthias Andree wrote:

> David Relson <relson at osagesoftware.com> writes:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> The 
> 
> :0e:
> {
>         EXITCODE=75
>         HOST
> }
> 
> section is supposed to catch that so mail does NOT end up in the wrong
> folder.

My mailserver has the typical /var/spool/mail/username files for
postfix.  In addition there are a few extra files, such as mail.backup,
bogofilter, spam, etc where procmail puts copies of certain messages. 
My procmailrc is (roughly):

  1 - copy to 'mail.backup'
  2 - run bogofilter
  3 - copy of spam to 'spam'
  4 - copy of messages from bogofilter lists to 'bogofilter'
  5 - spam to 'relson'
  6 - message to 'username'

Thus all messages to users should have an X-Bogosity line in the
headers.  When I turn off procmail locking (using ":0fw" rather than
":0fw:" before running bogofilter), I have seen occasional messages
without X-Bogosity lines and can find corresponding "rescue" messages in
/var/log/procmail.


> > I _think_ what we're seeing here is that, without procmail locking,
> > bogofilter encountered a locking problem, quit, and procmail
> > recovered(rescued) the message.
> 
> Bogofilter is supposed to wait, rather than quit, in case of locking
> trouble.

Correct, and it looks like that may not be happening :-(.

> > 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
> > ...".
> 
> Of course, it writes a pipe.
> 
> > As you know, I value bogofilter's histograms.  The "-U" them to be
> > included when the message is classified as "unsure".
> 
> I asked because I didn't find it in the TXN version's man page.

Guess it's time for a man page update :-<

David