I was thinking about implementing Courier support for AMaViS-ng, so I started playing around with perlfilter.

But I have had no luck so far, at least with the Debian package of courier-mta (0.37-5). So, I started out with the supplied example which is installed to /usr/share/doc/courier-mta/examples/perlfilter-example.pl by the Debian package.

I did an

# echo /usr/share/doc/courier-mta/examples/perlfilter-example.pl >
/etc/courier/filters/perlfilter

and

# filterctl start perlfilter

After restarting courierfilter by doing

# courierfilter stop # courierfilter start

...CPU usage goes up quite a bit, but monitoring the process list shows that the perlfilter processes don't live a very long life. They die like flies, so that the controlling process has quite a bit of work to do in order to bury its dead children.

The syslog shows a LOT of those:

,---- | perlfilter: Child process 22079 terminated - restarting. `----

Testing the example script with

# perl -c /usr/share/doc/courier-mta/examples/perlfilter-example.pl

showed that it is at least syntactically correct.

A socket /var/lib/courier/filters/perlfilter has been created, communication should not be a problem.

Where might the problem be, or are there ways to enable more diagnostics?

-Hilko