Message duplicates (was: Changes between GTA1 and GTA2?)

[Marco Barreno]

On Fri, Aug 17, 2007 at 01:06:53PM +0800, thus spake Harald Welte:
> [...]
> 
> It's actually a crashing spamassassin, which then causes the DATA
> section of an incoming SMTP transfer to time out, which again causes
> some sending email servers, such as gmail, who have a short timeout, to
> transfer the message again.

I see.  So it sounds like a spamassassin bug?  If there isn't a bug
fix available to download, I'm not sure what's the best thing to do
about it.  Perhaps the list software could be configured to accept a
message if spamassassin crashes?  Since we haven't seen a lot of spam
duplicated to the list like we've seen normal messages, doing this
probably wouldn't start letting a lot of spam through to the list.

And a question for anyone: do you know whether most MTAs use timeouts
longer than RFC 2821 suggests?  (See section 4.5.3.2 of
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2821.html for minimum timeouts.)  I'm
pretty sure Gmail doesn't use shorter timeouts, but since it's the
main source of duplicated messages that makes me wonder if everyone
else jacks up the timeouts by a bunch.

> 
> And 'some mail admin' is unfortunately just me. 

We all know you're overworked and overstressed, and we all appreciate
everything you do very much!  Thanks for taking a bit of time to look
into this.  If the spamassassin crashes could be prevented or worked
around somehow, that would be a great solution to this problem.


Marco