Summary: Enabling spamassassin after virtualmin is installed causes incoming mail for mailboxes to be rejected with the message "can't create user output file".
I initially installed virtualmin (on Ubuntu 10.04) using install.sh but without spamassassin enabled, because I don't generally store mail I only forward it, and I don't want to deal with false positives or false negatives. However, after several failed attempts at stopping "backscatter" spam from postfix (see separate thread) I tried enabling spamassassin. Unfortunately I don't think spamassassin works on forwarded mail (is this true? - I see conflicting reports) but I was hoping it might help for other reasons.
Anyway, I do actually have a couple of mailboxes that accept messages for processing by mailing list software and I found they weren't receiving any messages. They were being rejected with the error message "can't create user output file", which was strange because I checked that there was plenty of disc space and write privileges in all the right places (after a lot of googling).
Eventually I checked my procmail logs and found lots of "Disk quota has been reached" messages and spent some time making sure quotas were disabled. I tried disabling and enabling spamassassin and clamav (in System Settings/Features and Plugins as well as Edit Virtual Servers/Enabled Features) but nothing made any difference. It seems lookup-domain.pl needs some server to run but I couldn't find it. I had to generate a clean virtualmin installation in a virtual machine and copy the procmailrc file from that to get mailboxes working again.
This caused me many hours of pain, so my request is for the enabling and disabling of spamassassin to be made more robust, or if that's not possible (and I appreciate it's difficult) to be disabled or made harmless.
Comments
Submitted by andreychek on Mon, 08/27/2012 - 22:08 Comment #1
Unfortunately I don't think spamassassin works on forwarded mail
If you setup forwarding within Virtualmin, then no, SpamAssassin would not scan that email. The email is forwarded before SpamAssassin checks the message.
Anyway, I do actually have a couple of mailboxes that accept messages for processing by mailing list software and I found they weren't receiving any messages. They were being rejected with the error message "can't create user output file", which was strange because I checked that there was plenty of disc space and write privileges in all the right places (after a lot of googling).
Enabling SpamAssassin shouldn't cause an error like that. That error is given by procmail, and means that there's a problem writing to the disk.
There are multiple quotas for a given account.
One of those is the user's quota that you can see in Edit Users.
But there's also a domain-wide quota, that you can see by going into Edit Virtual Server -> Quotas and Limits.
I suspect one of those two quotas had somehow been reached.
No, I'm pretty sure it was lookup-domain.pl that's failing.