maildrop + bogofilter: error writing to filter

[David Relson]

On Sat, 15 Jun 2013 07:01:29 -0400
Jonathan Kamens wrote:

> On 06/15/2013 06:44 AM, Christian Ebert wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I tried my luck at the courier-maildrop list
> > http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=20130613110855.GB753%40krille.blacktrash.org&forum_name=courier-maildrop
> > but was basically referred to bogofilter. So here goes:
> >
> > After an upgrade to Mac OS 10.8.4 (64bit) from 10.5.8 (32bit) I
> > get the following error for _some_ messages:
> >
> > temporary failure.
> > Command output: maildrop: error writing to filter.
> > /usr/local/bin/maildrop: Unable to filter message.
> >
> > The offending rule is rather bog standard:
> > xfilter "/usr/local/bin/bogofilter -u -e -p"
> >
> > Trying the bogofilter suspect on an offending message however
> > seems to cause no problems:
> >
> > $ bogofilter -u -e -p < testbogomsg 1>/dev/null
> > $ echo $?
> > 0
> You're doing two things wrong here: (1) you're not calling bogofilter 
> the same way maildrop does; and (2) you're throwing away the
> information that would be most likely to tell you what's going wrong.
> Let's take these one at a time...
> 
> (1) Maildrop isn't giving connecting bogofilter's stdin to a file on 
> disk. Rather, it is connecting bogofilter's stdin to one end of a
> pipe, and it's writing the email message into the other end of the
> pipe so that bogofilter can read it. If you are trying to test what's
> going wrong with maildrop and bogofilter, you need to do the same
> thing. Something like this:
> 
>     cat testbogomsg | bogofilter -u -e -p 1>/dev/null
> 
> (2) Maildrop is telling you that bogofilter is exiting before reading 
> all data from the pipe. One way you can confirm that is if you see
> "cat: Broken pipe" or something like that when you run the command
> immediately above, which will tell you that cat ran into the same
> problem as maildrop. But even if that doesn't happen, you can find
> out if bogofilter is reading the whole message by checking to see if
> if /prints/ the whole message on its output, and you can't do that if
> you throw the output away as shown above. Try this instead:
> 
>     cat testbogomsg | bogofilter -u -e -p >| bogoout
>     diff testbogomsg bogoout
> 
> If the "cat" command prints an error, or if testbogomsg differs from 
> bogoout aside from the added X-Bogosity line, then you have managed
> to reproduce the issue that maildrop is seeing, and we can debug
> further from there. If not, then we're going to have to get more
> creative in our debugging efforts.
> 
> By the way, the people on the other mailing list from which you
> sought help told you the same thing about checking the output:
> > |You should look at what bogofilter is printing, for the offending
> > |messages. It can't be the original message, if bogofilter isn't
> > even |reading it. Perhaps looking at bogofilter's output, for the
> > message, |will provide more clues.
> Does this happen consistently for the same email message. I.e., if 
> there's a particular email message that triggers this problem, does
> it happen every time maildrop tries to deliver that message?
> 
>    jik

Hi Christian,

For sure if it's a consistent error for a particular message, we'd like
to see the message.  If so, please create a tgz or zip file with the
message and email it directly to me.

By the way, what version of bogofilter are you running?  1.2.3 is
current.

Regards,

David