Since some time I was getting nearly each day an email from my cron :

/etc/cron.daily/spamassassin:
invoke-rc.d: initscript spamassassin, action "reload" failed.

Googling for this I found several posts, bug tracker entries… but no real solution. Hint was : RC script is not finding the PID file, check that it exists, that the directory exists, that the file&dir are writeable etc…

Status quo : PID file did not exit (/var/run/spamd.pid), and a “start” action was bringing the error message : port already in use

Investigating further on this last error message I came across a post on the Debian ML : this may be due to the fact that spamd tries to bind to ::1 (localhost but IPv6).

As my rootserver has no IPv6 for now, I followed the advice from the post, and added the option -4 to the /etc/default/spamassassin. This make SA only bind to IPv4 port.

Et voila, spamassassin starts, creates its PID file. Looking for the next days to see if I get post from cron or if the problem is really gone now !