Hi Nigel, Graeme, yes I think your both more or less correct. The high load thing has only started to be a problem in the last day or so, however I have seen other unexpected behaviour from Spamassassin, specifically unexplained crashes. Anyway the high load has sent me into a panic as it was severely impacting the server performance and users were started to complain. So at the moment the situation would seem to be, with regard to my original question, that my exim config is fine (despite being outdated) in terms that all mails are being passed to spamassassin. The problem would seem to be spamassassin itself. The thing that surprises me is that its possible for spamassassin to pass back an unmodified mail if it has some kind of failure, Id have imagined a failure would result in some fatal error and a bounce or retry as opposed to simply passing back an unchecked mail.
Anyway, following on from advice from the spamassassin users list, I have changed the backend of spamassassin from DBD (flat files) to MySQL. Currently the system seems to be running well. If that will continue as the bayes DB starts to be populated with data, time will tell... Hopefully thats an accurate description of the situation. Ill monitor for any mails coming through without being spamassassin checked... thanks Andy. -- ## List details at http://lists.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-users ## Exim details at http://www.exim.org/ ## Please use the Wiki with this list - http://wiki.exim.org/
