Hello all,
I posted on this topic back in late January to no resolution. After
spending most all of this weekend doing research, I still am at a total
loss, but do have clues on getting my problem resolved.
Just a brief history. I currently use the DirectAdmin (
www.directadmin.com)
webhosting control panel on my server. When this software was installed, it
installs the Exim MTA email server along with SpamAssassin. When I
orginially setup the server on Dec. 21, 2004, DirectAdmin installed Exim
4.24 & SpamAssassin 2.55. Everything worked pefectly. SpamAssassin would
filter all the emails accordingly with the tagged subjects coming in having
been tagged by S.A. after I set the predetermined threshold level.
However, after I upgraded to Exim 4.60 & SpamAssassin 3.1.0 in December, I
experienced major major headaches of email just coming to a grinding halt.
Out of the normal 50 emails I would get per every 8 hours, only 5-10 were
sitting in my inbox. MANY customers complained that they were not getting
email, that email others were sending to them was bouncing back back with
421 Undeliverable errors.
I did research on this and found that many others were having similiar
errors. So this weekend I decided to really sit down and detail what is
happening. First, I made sure my firewall was open to localhost traffic
using TCP on S.A.s standard port. Then I went back, completely removed Exim
4.60 and reinstalled Exim 4.24. Likewise I also went and removed
SpamAssassin 3.1.0 and reinstalled SpamAssassin 2.55. During this time, I
did keep my current exim.conf file.
Immediately upon the reinstallation and starting the exim service and
running spamd -d -c -m 5 commands, everything actually worked. The logs
were showing emails were getting delievered and completed as normal. Spam
emails were getting tagged. However, within 4 hours of reinstalling those
software packages, emails start getting frozen in the Exim queue. I just
don't mean one or two emails, I'm talking well over a hundred.
What I don't get is the fact that these very same binaries worked PERFECTLY
together last year and the only thing I can say is that it's the exim.conf
file. Everything else was the same. This is becoming a huge headache for
me with customers. Many are complaining that there is little spam
protection, then on the flipside when I enable SA, their emails just don't
arrive because they get frozen away in the Exim queue. My best estimation
is that something in the latest exim.conf file is miscommunicating with
SpamAssassin. Or SpamAssassin doesn't know how to handle communication from
Exim so it's either taking too long to scan, or it's tossing the email back
to Exim saying undeliverable. Either way I need to get this resolved
quickly before mumbling customers start getting the idea of wanting money
back. See below for a copy of the header of a sample frozen email. Also I
have my exim.conf file handy for anyone who wants to see. Also the server
load on my system is non-existant. Normal load averages during the day are
like 0.01 / 0.01 / 0.01.
A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:
mleatherland@ <mailto:mleatherland@<domainremoved>.com>
<domainremoved>.com
local delivery failed
The following text was generated during the delivery attempt:
------ mleatherland@ <mailto:mleatherland@<domainremoved>.com>
<domainremoved>.com ------
An error was detected while processing a file of BSMTP input.
The error message was:
421 SMTP incoming data timeout - message abandoned
The SMTP transaction started in line 0.
The error was detected in line 3.
0 previous messages were successfully processed.
The rest of the batch was abandoned.
421 SMTP incoming data timeout - message abandoned
Transaction started in line 0
Error detected in line 3
