Re: MySQL Bayes store, and bayes_auto_expire, not auto-expiring

[email protected] Sat, 1 Nov 2025 13:10:43 +0100

Newsgroups	gmane.mail.spam.spamassassin.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On 10/30/25 11:19 AM, Jess Robinson wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Asking here before I report a bug / attempt a patch.
> 
> We noticed that with bayes_auto_expire set to true, using a MySQL bayes store, the auto-expiry does not run. The system has been up for several months, and the bayes_expire table remains empty. Manual --force-expire via sa-learn works ok once tried.
> 
> Version: SA 4.0.0
> Scanning via exim / spamc
> Manual spam reporting: spamc -L
> 
> After a large amount of code reading yesterday, I think this is because the MySQL BayesStore does not implement get_storage_variables - https://github.com/apache/spamassassin/blob/9e1677a6b73dc163c97bf382d9767856fe3ccbef/lib/Mail/SpamAssassin/BayesStore.pm#L570
> 
from Mail::SpamAssassin::Conf
        bayes_auto_expire             (default: 1)
            If enabled, the Bayes system will try to automatically expire old tokens from the database.  Auto-expiry occurs when the number of tokens in the database surpasses the bayes_expiry_max_db_size value.
            If a bayes datastore backend does not implement individual key/value expirations, the setting is silently ignored.

In MySQL storage, auto_expire has not been implemented, currently I am running "sa-learn --force-expire -u $user" for each user weekly.

  Cheers
   Giovanni

> This is used in expiry_due in BayesStore: https://github.com/apache/spamassassin/blob/9e1677a6b73dc163c97bf382d9767856fe3ccbef/lib/Mail/SpamAssassin/BayesStore.pm#L462
> 
> which presumably dies instead.
> 
> It was expected to run given the docs in sa-learn https://spamassassin.apache.org/full/4.0.x/doc/sa-learn.html#EXPIRATION which do not mention any bayesstore exceptions.
> 
> Am I barking up the correct tree?
> 
> Separately: is auto_expire recommended, or should we be creating some sort of cronjob to run thousands of user expiry calls manually?
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Jess Robinson / Runbox (setting up per-user spam training)

OpenPGP_signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 840 B)