Spamassassin: sa-learn fails in cronjob

[Daniel Eiteneuer]

Running
su amavis -c '/usr/bin/sa-learn -D --ham /tmp/learn_mail'
in a cronjob leads to the output being sent via mail (see text file). Spamassassin complains about a problem on loading plug-ins such like:
plugin: failed to parse plugin (from @INC): Can't locate Mail/SpamAssassin/Plugin/SpamCop.pm: Keine Berechtigung at (eval 33) line 1.
Note: "Keine Berechtigung" is German and means something like no authorization. But the perl file exists and everyone can read it:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8578 Feb 7 09:36 /usr/share/perl5/Mail/SpamAssassin/Plugin/SpamCop.pm
The same for all other plug-ins.
Running the command as mentioned above manually from the shell as user root works perfectly, no errors.
I'm using spamassassin version 3.4.0-1ubuntu1 and perl version 5.18.2-2ubuntu1 on Ubuntu 14.04.

Maybe there is relation to:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1008415
?? Don't know.

Regards
Nuesel

[Daniel Eiteneuer (nuesel)]

In the meantime, I've got several e-mails indicating problems during some cron jobs:

mail subject: Cron <amavis@gruenbaer> test -e /usr/sbin/amavisd-new-cronjob && /usr/sbin/amavisd-new-cronjob sa-sync
refcnt: fd -1 < 0

mail subject: Cron <amavis@gruenbaer> test -e /usr/sbin/amavisd-new-cronjob && /usr/sbin/amavisd-new-cronjob sa-sync
rules: failed to run header tests, skipping some: __alarm__ignore__(39/::Plugin::Check::run_eval_tests/1097)

mail subject: Cron <amavis@gruenbaer> test -e /usr/sbin/amavisd-new-cronjob && /usr/sbin/amavisd-new-cronjob sa-sync
rules: failed to compile Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::Check::_body_tests_0_1, skipping:
 (__alarm__ignore__(1/::PerMsgStatus::check/1414))

I would be happy, if someone can give someone can give me a hint, why amavis fails in cron jobs?
I upgraded the system from an Ubuntu 12.04 installation. Maybe this has something to do with the problem?

Regards
Nuesel

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

From the upstream bug report, https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1008415, the finding is that the permission denied error stems from the cronjob running sa-learn from the /root directory, which the cronjob's process doesn't have access to.

Does this issue still occur with a newer version of Ubuntu?