UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Watching my maillog this morning i have discovered some errors but I cant track down whats causing them.

Code:

Jun 16 11:04:12 ws096 sendmail[6613]: m5GExW7e006613: Milter (spamass-milter): timeout before data read
Jun 16 11:04:12 ws096 sendmail[6613]: m5GExW7e006613: Milter (spamass-milter): to error state
Jun 16 11:04:12 ws096 sendmail[6613]: m5GExW7e006613: Milter: data, reject=451 4.3.2 Please try again later
Jun 16 11:04:12 ws096 sendmail[6613]: m5GExW7e006613: to=<>, delay=00:04:00, pri=68114, stat=Please try again later

and

Code:

Jun 16 11:04:19 ws096 spamd[3387]: prefork: child states: BBBBBBBB
Jun 16 11:04:19 ws096 spamd[10891]: spamd: connection from localhost [127.0.0.1] at port 45431
Jun 16 11:04:19 ws096 spamd[3387]: prefork: server reached --max-children setting, consider raising it

Now doing a spama lint test resulted in this

Code:

[4163] warn: bayes: cannot open bayes databases /home/nuonce/spamassassin/bayes_* R/W: lock failed: File exists
[4163] warn: bayes: cannot open bayes databases /home/nuonce/spamassassin/bayes_* R/W: lock failed: File exists
[4163] warn: bayes: cannot open bayes databases /home/nuonce/spamassassin/bayes_* R/W: lock failed: File exists

thoughts ideas?

Thanks!

The "maxchildren" error message says that you are running out of spamd processes -- there are more messages coming in than there are spamd instances to handle them. I would suspect that the other problems are related to this. For example, the lint probably cannot gain access to the Bayes database if there are multiple spamd processes in queue to access it, and presumably Sendmail is configured to return a transient error if it can't run the spam scan.

See if you can add more spamd child processes, and/or make them go faster. If you are not using Bayes journaling and/or a database back-end for the Bayes data, those are some of the standard speed-up techniques for spamd. You should probably visit the SpamAssassin wiki for more information, anyway.

PS. Your friendly Toyota dealer would probably appreciate if you didn't post their email address in the clear. That's how you attract spam in the first place. You can click the Edit button in the lower right corner of your post to go back and replace the email address with whatever@example.com which is guaranteed by the IANA to never correspond to a real, live email inbox.

some how i had forgot I posted this already
my apologies

What I ended up doing was editing /etc/sysconfig/spamassassin

and up the max child processes to 10 from 8 but it seems that the error has restarted again. what could be causing this you think?

Thanks

You will need more of them. Try something much larger like 25 and see how things develop. The number of Bs tell you how many of the children are busy.