[Mimedefang] "Slave died prematurely" and SpamAssassin

[Fred Bacon]

Hi,

This may simply be the result of my doing things incorrectly, but I have
been seeing an increase in the number of "Slave x died
prematurely...check your filter rules" messages in my logs.  This
results in messages failing to be delivered. 

I'm running MIMEDefang 2.52 and SpamAssassin 3.0.4 on a Fedora Core 2
system.  I've set MX_EMBED_PERL=yes in my /etc/sysconfig/mimedefang
file. .

After some research, the problem seems to correlate with any change to
the SpamAssassin configuration files.  If I add an address to the white
list, or create a new rule, or get an update from SARE and then I run
"/sbin/service mimedefang reread" (or even do nothing) the mimedefang
slaves start dieing at an increasing rate.  Running "/sbin/service
mimedefang restart" fixes the problem. 

Was I doing the wrong thing all along, or should giving the multiplexor
the reread command have worked?  

What are the consequences of giving the restart command while incoming
mail is being processed?

If you make changes to the SpamAssassin configuration, what is the
appropriate way to make MIMEDefang recognize and utilize those changes?

Fred

-- 
Fred Bacon <bacon at aerodyne.com>
Aerodyne Research, Inc.