Bogofilter Behaviour on encountering error is unacceptable.

[Tom Anderson]

K T Ligesh wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 20, 2007 at 10:38:37PM +0100, Matthias Andree wrote:
>>K T Ligesh schrieb:
>>>Hi folks,
>>>
>>> It seems that when bogofilter encounters some problems like the lack of the wordlist file, it just truncates the mail completely and sends only a couple of headers across. This is dangerous since if you have a large number of users, it is likely that there will be times when the wordlist files are missing. The behaviour that I am expecting is that it should just pass the entire message without doing anything on it.
>>>
>>> At least, according to me, the current behaviour makes bogofilter actually unusable since there is a very high chance of mails completely getting lost. Is there some configuration option that will tell bogofilter to return the entire message unaltered when it encounters an error?
>>
>>Then integrate bogofilter properly with the rest of your system.
>>In such situations, bogofilter will exit with error code 3 which you can
>>test for and handle accordingly, such as push the message back to the
>>mailserver's queue or retrieve the unfiltered message or do things like
>>that. This is not a bogofilter bug.
> 
>  I want the default behaviour to be sane. Are you saying that what I have described is indeed how bogofilter behaves on encountering an error? Even with complex script solutions like 'returning the mail back to the queue', things can go wrong, and we are unnecessarily bringing in complications.
> 
>  Spam check is not an essential service. Of course, it is an absolute must considering the amount of spam, but when we have to choose between lot of spam getting through and mails getting completely munged by the spam filter, I think the choice is obvious. The default behaviour should be let the mail through unaltered when it encounters an error and report the situation on stderr.

I'm pretty sure this is exactly what Matthias is saying... the default 
behaviour when Bogofilter returns an error code should be to let the 
mail through unaltered via procmail or however you have Bogofilter 
integrated into your mail chain.  Bogofilter is not a mail delivery 
agent, so it cannot be responsible for "letting it through".  You need 
to make sure your system handles returning the mail to the queue or 
however you wish to handle it after Bogofilter says there's been an error.

Tom