That was always a problem for me with this utility. I ran with such a watchdog script for quite some time but finally moved to "milter-spamc" ( http://www.milter.info/solutions.php ) where this doesn't seem to be a problem.Unfortunately the snert packages have a non-free license and hence can't be included in Extras.
It appears there are a lot of milters out there. The ones on http://smfs.sourceforge.net/ sound appealing to me. Haven't tried any of them, though. Pim
