[Mimedefang] MIMEdefang and Spamd/Spamc

[Steffen Kaiser]

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On Sat, 10 Nov 2007, Rick Knight wrote:

Hello,

> getting error messages about "malformed_spamc_report". It seems the spamc 
> report is not being read by mimedefang-filter. Can any one offer a suggestion 
> on how to correct this? Or maybe another solution?
>
> I'm running MIMEDefang 2.63, SpamAssassin 3.23 and CLamav 0.92 on Slackware 
> with Kernel 2.6.14.

I run plain Debian Etch with spamassassin 3.1.7-2 and run such setup 
since Sept 2007.

I have adopted a Client.pm that is shipped with SpamAssassin:

http://www2.inf.fh-bonn-rhein-sieg.de/skdata/MIMEDefang-Spamd.tar.bz2

I added some checks, the possibility to push contents from a file (rather 
than from memory) and tweaked the API so it returns what I think is 
sensible. Also included is the part in my filter. (Maybe I cut off too 
much, but the idea is readable.)

Overall, I cannot say that by using spamc the system load or performance 
got better, also: spamc forks each time a request is passed to it, but the 
shared memory is very small: For testing purpose, I configured spamc to 
use William Stern's Blacklist and some other ones, each process was approx 
400MB in size, but the individual clients scanning a request have only 
636KB shared memory. Maybe I interprete the memory statistic wrong, but it 
doesnot look nice.

David already mentioned that this behaviour is (most likely) related to 
the reference counting of Perl's data management.

I did went the route to spamc.pm mostly, because I use SPAM checking also 
from outside MIMEDefang, but I start to wonder if I revert the step.
But there is one advantage: If you can trust the local socket of spamd, 
you can run spamd as root and can have spamc pass over any user you like 
to have spamd read its configuration from.

Bye,

- -- 
Steffen Kaiser
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