spam away

The config changes worked and qmail is automatically quarantining and deleting spam. The thing to be careful of is that the quarantine and deletion values are relative the spam score. If you mark anything with a 5 or more as spam, setting the quarantine value to 5 and the delete value to 8 would mean that the message would need to score a 10+ to be quarantined and a 13+ to be deleted. Not quite what I wanted.

Spam messages still get through to the mailman moderation but that's because we aren't training spamassassin at all. We're just using the default rules.

sinking ship

I think that evolt.org as a community is dead. Of course we still get traffic to thelist and we still get random comments being posted on the evolt.org site but that doesn't make for a community. Ever since Dan Cody left, it feels like we can't get things done. I'm not saying that everything was perfect then either but things seemed to move forward. Every community needs a driving force to get things done. Every community needs to reach a certain critical mass before individuals withdraw themselves from the community. The odd thing is, it's the driving the community that forced Dan to leave.

Some of the community thought that running by committee was going to push evolt.org forward and that Dan's individualism was getting in the way. I should have learned my lesson from reading The Fountainhead that things don't necessarily work that way. Of course, I'm being a little melodramatic but it does seem that we've lost our motivation and drive and let inertia take over.

The most obvious instance is that the newest content on evolt.org is the re-design contest dated Mar 5. The contest was supposed to have closed Apr 30 and the discussion on the desdev list was supposed to end on Jul 1. The contest was supposed to drum up interest in the community but in reality we only received two entries from well-established evolters, Tara Cleveland and Martin Burns. So we can't even get the deck chairs re-arranged on the Titanic.

Many of the old time evolters that loved and pushed the commmunity have left, seemingly for good. Gone are aardvark, Mishka, r937, isaac, .jeff, and many others.

I'll admit to never being always there and when I was, I was usually a spectator, but I miss it a bit. (Heh. Another old man pining away for the golden years.) So why have I stayed since the beginning? I'm not really sure. Many times, I've thought about leaving the community altogether, the most recent, the day before yesterday. But I can't seem to get away. I love the idea of the community and I can't let them down no matter how loose we've become. I haven't left because I feel owned by the community. I don't like to ignore our members. I want them to come back. I want them to use evolt.org as a resource. I want them to feel valued. And I don't think that they will if I leave. Is that egotistical or just sad?

The motto of the admin group was that we were building the community so that the commmunity didn't need us anymore. We're as far away from that as we've ever been but many of the admin group have moved on. Will I go down with the ship? Probably. I'm too dumb and sentimental to have it any other way.

quarantined

In order to reduce some the of strain on mailman, I decided to take a look at the qmail-scanner-queue.pl script that is part of the qmailrocks distribution to see if I could convince spamassassin to delete obvious spam. It turns out that there are settings in the script to quarantine as well as delete spam based on the assigned spamassassin score. By default, this feature is turned off. However, virus scanning also quarantines messages and it is turned on by default. So, similar to when I fixed the exim problem, we have 27000+ quarantined messages taking up space on the server. As well, the log files for the qmail-scanner haven't been rotated since the installation so they're huge as well. All part of the fun.

spam

We've been hit by a ton of spam lately. We used to only get a couple hundred a day but now where probably getting a thousand a day. It seems that the increase load is breaking either mailman or qmail in the sense that delivery stops. We had some problems over the weekend where there were a bunch of dead qmail processes and even though port 25 seemed to be open, mailman was throwing errors about not being able to connect to the localhost. I stopped qmail and cleaned up the processes and then restarted. Things started to move after that. I'll have to check the logs to see if it is the spam that is causing the problem or if it is something else.

list down!

It's funny when something goes wrong with the mailing list. The first thing people tend to do is e-mail a test message to the list. Of course, that's useless when the list is down and, at worst, spamming when the list is up. The better thing to do is to contact the list owner offlist.

It's likely that the list owner already knows that it is down and is working the problem. How? In most usual cases, the list owner gets a bunch of spam or mailer-daemon errors throughout the day. When those dry up, there's obviously something wrong.

One thing that you should do first though is to check the archives. If the last message there doesn't match the last message you received, then the list is up but you haven't received the message yet. This could be a misconfiguration on your side or a slow mail server. Check your configuration or your filters first.

That said, the problem that we had with the lists today and last night appears to have been a mailman problem. spamd was also dead on the server when I looked and mailman was throwing some errors about not being able to connect. I restarted spamd and restarted mailman's qrunner processes. There were over 3000 pieces of mail queued up by mailman though and going through them was incredibly slow. So I commented out the SpamAssassin handler in mm_cfg.py to remove it from the pipeline and restarted qrunner. On top of that, I went through and manually removed a bunch of obvious spam from the queue. mailman finally caught up and we should be back to normal operation.