PATCHES: spamc - filter retries, and command line processing

[Ty! Boyack]

Folks,

Thanks to all for the work on Spamassassin - I'm not really in the dev
community here, and am probably committing a faux pa here by sending up
patches that are against the stable 3.2.4 release, not the dev tree.
Sorry if this is not standard practice.

However, we've been having some problems with spamd hanging, similar to
what's been discussed on the mailing list.  The result for us was that
if a spamd server got hung up, each message sent to that server would be
stalled for the timeout value (600s), then return unprocessed.  We have
3 servers handling spam, and this meant that roughly 1/3 of our messages
would pass unfiltered when one of our spamd servers would get hung up.

To help work around this, I've added a filter-loop to spamc.  It takes
two new arguments:  --filter-retries and --filter-retry-sleep.  I did
not want to complicate things with overloading connect-retries which
only comes into play if there are tcp connection troubles, not filter
timeouts.  By setting filter-retries to a value other than 1 (the
default is 1 to keep the default behavior the same), it will try to
filter the message through spamd, but if the filter times out, it will
try again up to filter-retries times.  I also moved the call to
randomize the host list into this loop so that it will be re-randomized
each time the filter is attempted.

The patch for this is attached as 'filterloop.patch'.

I've also added a small patch called 'fixdest.patch' that fixes a minor
command line issue.  When specifying the hosts, -d works, but --dest
does not.  This patch fixes that.

I put these together out of our own needs here, so I'm sorry that I have
not gone through the bug trackers to see if I'm re-inventing the wheel.
Still, I hope that someone who is more intimate with the code than me


Thanks again for such a GREAT tool!!!

-Ty!

(P.S. Sorry for the re-send if both came through)

--
-===========================-
  Ty! Boyack
  NREL Unix Network Manager
  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
  (970) 491-1186
-===========================-

can make use of these fixes and features. I have not done any updates to the documentation as part of this patch, but would be glad to do so if it would help -- but I would need pointers as where to do that properly.

spamc-patches-2008-03-31.tgz
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