Elehost Web Design Inc.

In the process of upgrading Spamassassin 3.3.1 through portupgrade on Freebsd to I ran into the following problem.

 

Starting spamd.
child process [5443] exited or timed out without signaling production of a PID file: exit 25 at /usr/local/bin/spamd line 2585.

I searched on-line and saw a bit of information about reinstalling.

I decided to run spamassassin --lint to see what it might show and I was surprised to see the following:

 

config: no rules were found!  Do you need to run 'sa-update'?

So a quick update of the spam rules by running "sa-update" and now the sa-spamd starts just fine. For anyone who gets the above error make sure your rules are not missing for some odd reason after running portupgrade. There is usually an option to ask the user to download the latest update during the portupgrade install so this is probably a rare solution to the above problem. Despite this fact, it takes so little time to check if the above error is caused by a missing rule file so its worth a quick check.