[Mimedefang] Filter timed out

David F. Skoll dfs at roaringpenguin.com
Sat Apr 27 18:44:50 EDT 2002


>     Mail is flowing.  That's the good news.  Even under high load, everything
> is flowing nicely.  However, occasionally I will get one of them stuck and I
> see this in my syslog:

>         mimedefang[23863]: Error from multiplexor: ERR Filter timed out
>         sendmail[23842]: g3RMN5w6023842: Milter: data, reject=451 4.7.1
>                          Please try again later
>     How can I find out what's causing this to happen?  That "stuck" message
> never gets delivered.

Is the stuck message very big?  Large messages can sometimes take a long
time to process, especially if you are using SpamAssassin.  Some things
that might help:

- Check the message size in your filter and simplify the processing if it's
  big.  For example, spam messages are seldom over 20-30kB; don't run
  SpamAssassin on very large messages.

- Increase the timeouts both for the multiplexor (the -b flag) and the
  correspoding time in the Sendmail configuration file.

- Try to capture a problematic message and run your filter on it by hand.
  Make sure there's not an error in the filter which causes an endless loop.

- Enable logging (the -l flag to the multiplexor) to see if it sheds any light.

Regards,

David.




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