Hi,
I'm running procmail with sendmail on a Redhat Linux system. Please
forgive me if any of the below is stupid, I'm still learning this stuff.
Ever since I started using procmail to filter messages through
spamassassin (using spamc/spamd), I've been running into a sendmail
"knownbug" -- namely:
----------
* Delivery to programs that generate too much output may cause problems
If e-mail is delivered to a program which generates too much
output, then sendmail may issue an error:
timeout waiting for input from local during Draining Input
Make sure that the program does not generate output beyond a
status message (corresponding to the exit status). This may
require a wrapper around the actual program to redirect output
to /dev/null.
----------
The effect is that I get a bunch of stalled procmail and sendmail
processes (one of each for the message that caused the problem, and an
additional one of each for every subsequent message to that user), and
of course none of the mail is actually delivered to the user in
question. In order to fix the problem, I stop sendmail, killall
procmail, killall sendmail, open the user's mailbox
(/var/spool/mail/username) in vi and add a newline at the end, and then
restart sendmail. If I don't add the newline to the user's mailbox, the
problem reappears immediately when I restart sendmail. I have no idea
why this is.
With about 20 users, this happens once or twice a day (in total, not
each user). It doesn't happen if procmail isn't invoked.
This problem (or similar) has shown up a few times on this list, but I
haven't come across a solution that has worked for me. As per David
Stern's advice from last June, I've increased the value of
"Timeout.Quit" in sendmail.cf, but to no effect.
Basically, I'm wondering if anyone has any advice on how I might go
about (from sendmail knownbugs): "Making sure that the program does not
generate output beyond a status message (corresponding to the exit
status)." As far as I can see, this is the only way I'm going to solve
this problem. I assume that it's procmail that is generating the output,
but if it's spamassassin, I'll take the question to that list.
Every time spamd is invoked, I get 5 lines in my maillog -- could this
be the output that's messing with sendmail?
Thanks for any advice.
Cheers,
Noah
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