Re: Explanation of error messages.

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Sep 20), Ron Snyder said:
> > This could be caused by memory corruption that happened earlier. 
> > Try setting the enviroment variable MALLOC_OPTIONS="AJ" before
> > starting spamass-milter, and see if instead of a segfault, you get
> > a malloc-initiated abort().
> 
> Hmm. This had the nasty side effect of replacing any messages that
> failed the spam assassin test with a bunch of 'D' characters (some
> kind of funky D). (Note-- I have spamassassin configured to not
> modify the text of the message or to change the subject line-- I want
> it only to add spamAssassin headers to the message.)

You know, that happens on my FreeBSD system too, and I also have it
configured to not mess with the body.  That means there's a problem in
sendmail itself where a block of memory is malloc'ed and the program
blindly uses the contents without zeroing it (the J malloc option tells
malloc to fill returned memory with 0xD0, which is perfectly legal and
will cause problems like this in bad code).  I did run spamass-milter
under valgrind for a few minutes on my Debian box with no ill effects,
though.  libmilter is small enough that i can probably just add a bunch
of debugging and figure out if it's at fault.  If the problem is in the
sendmail part of the mail handoff it'll be quite a bit harder to find.

Spamass-milter only calls malloc once and new once, and I can't see
anything wrong with the use of either.

-- 
        Dan Nelson
        address@hidden