Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] [gnu.org #1456067] Re: Problems with email and debbugs?

[Bob Proulx]

From: "Andrew Engelbrecht via RT"
> I'll look into the spamassassain issue.

The Bayes issue is probably something that has been that way for a
long time.  Potentially it has always been that way.  The error
message I see in the logs is:

  Dec  7 21:38:57 debbugs spamd[13350]: bayes: cannot open bayes databases 
/var/lib/spamassassin/nobody/bayes_* R/O: tie failed: Permission denied

And the dates on the files are from 2013.

  -rw------- 1 debian-spamd debian-spamd 170110976 Jun  8  2013 bayes_seen

SpamAssassin itself will continue without Bayes in this case.  It will
use the other rules to evaluate the message.

So I think this is one of those things that has always been this way.

On the good side the /var/lib/spamassassin/* rules are current and
appear to be getting updated okay.

> It's possible that some of its internal files got corrupted from
> our recent RAID array failure event a couple weeks ago. We have
> backup files that we can selectively restore if needed.

I think this is the biggest urgent need on debbugs right now.  There
were a surprising number of random files dropped or corrupted across
the machines that needed some fixup and recovery from backup and
restore from pristine on the Savannah systems.  Glenn reported a
missing file that he fixed earlier.  I would not be surprised to find
that there were others that need rescuing.

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> It seems something it still amiss.  Email to debbugs I sent more than
> 2 hours ago is still not acted upon by debbugs, and I received no
> responses from address@hidden for directives I sent to that
> address.

I poked my nose in there and found that spamd was not running.  Exim
was complaining that it couldn't contact it.  I started it back up
again and immediately exim started to log normal activity in the log
file.

If email on debbugs was not down too long (past the expire time on 3rd
party servers which would then generate a bounce) then mail will have
queued on the 3rd party servers and retry for 3 to 5 days.  Now that
it seems to be receiving mail I expect that over the next hour or four
those 3rd party servers will retry sending the mail.  I am hoping that
the cofferdam will now be broken and we will see a bunch of backlogged
mail flowing through.

Bob