[thelist] [OT] SpamAssassin with SQL user pref lookup

Peter Wakeford pwakeford at telkomsa.net
Thu May 27 16:39:22 CDT 2004


Has anyone had any experience with using SA 2.6x's SQL lookup component to
load user preferences from a db table? Specificially I was wondering about
how this would degrade the mail server performance.  At the moment, we have
a Mail Enable server calling the win32 WinSPAMC client which accesses the
spam filter (spamd) running on the CYGWIN emulator, to id spam/ham emails.
We set it up with the cygwin emulator b/c of the forking issue win32 has
with the perl spamassassin script (whereby each call is performed
synchronously, 1 after another).

To put the cherry on top, the plugin that we're using on the MTA pickup
event will probably need to parse the username in order to pass this to the
spam filter so it knows which user prefs to load.  This isn't the problem,
but what add's to the performance concern is that users not listed in the
db, will load a specific account's (assigned as the domain default)
preferences from the db.  This will require an additional lookup to be sure
the user is listed in the db table or not.

All these db connections add up to the growing concern of degrading the mail
server performance (likened to a dripping faucet, instead of one fully
opened):
- 1 to check if the user is in the db table (by the plugin) and
- 1 used by the spamfilter to load the actual user preferences

Anyone have experience or suggestions for this.  We've just purchased the
Mail Enable professional server a while back, so we're not likely to move
from this as our mail platform.

Peter




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