[TriLUG] procmail/spamassasin question

[Brian Henning]

Hi Folks,
  Is there some certain set of circumstances that would cause spamc to
completely skip a message?  Or is there a particular set of circumstances
where spamc won't make any marks on a message?  I was expecting that spamc
would make a mark on all messages it examined, either to say X-Spam-Status:
Yes or X-Spam-Status: No...  More and more spam is slipping through lately
(which is to be expected, I suppose), but a lot of it has no sa headers at
all, which almost suggests it's not getting scanned.  Here's the juicy bits
of my /etc/procmailrc file; maybe someone will see something wrong with it?

:0fw
| /usr/bin/spamc

# In two months of monitoring, I haven't seen a single false-positive.
# so /dev/null the >= 6 spam scorers
:0
* ^X-Spam-Level: \*\*\*\*\*\*
/dev/null

# Copy everything else to spamchek
:0c
/var/mail/spamchek


To my novice eye, that says "filter through spamc and wait for its output,
then /dev/null anything over 6, and then copy everything that's left to
spamchek"..
I know that procmail itself doesn't seem to be fouling up, because I'm
getting copies of mail in spamchek as I expect.

It's almost as though the spam originator has found either a way to cause
spamc to choke on the message, or a way to prevent spamc's headers from
being properly inserted into the message.  Anyone else seen and defeated
this issue?

Thanks greatly,
~Brian


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Brian A. Henning
Strutmasters.com
866.597.2397
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