Just checked the mailq on one of the servers we have running at Ork. I
found quite a few messages in it, most of which have dates in the far
past-- here's a sampling pulled 30 seconds ago:

k81ILR5o028221 8051974 Fri Sep 1 11:21 <munged@place.com>
<user@here.com>
k8TKQ9Tv025754 8158907 Fri Sep 29 13:26 <munged@munged.org>
<ruser@here.com>
k44FbdNt001100 8511 Thu May 4 08:37 MAILER-DAEMON
(Deferred)
<munged@munged.net>
k44FRpNt024793 389 Thu May 4 08:27 <munged@munged.net>
(Deferred: Bad file descriptor)
munged@munged.net
k6V8aWXx011018 14924 Mon Jul 31 01:37 <munged@munged.com>
(Deferred: 450 This mail is temporarily denied)
nyer@wlink.com.np


What would cause this? I thought Sendmail gave up after four days?

Are you sure the queue daemon is running, sendmail -qtime?

Try running the queue manually with:
sendmail -qf -v -d60.1 -d8.8

The debugging flags do:
-d60.1 Show database lookups
-d8.8 Show DNS query requests and problems

If all the mail gets delivered or bounced, then that would point
to a missing queue daemon or a queue daemon looking in the wrong
place.

You can also verify your queue timeout with:
grep Timeout.queuereturn= /etc/mail/sendmail.cf

The default is 5 days.

Hope this s

RLH

For info about our "Managing Internet Mail, Setting Up and Trouble
Shooting sendmail and DNS" and a schedule of dates and locations,
please send email to info@harker.com, or visit www.harker.com

Robert Harker Harker Systems
Sendmail, DNS and TCP/IP Network Training 4182 Pleasant Hill Rd.
Sendmail, Network and Sysadmin Consulting Lincoln, CA 95648
harker@harker.com 530-887-9990

Robert Harker wrote:
> Are you sure the queue daemon is running, sendmail -qtime?

Thanks for the response!

[root@box root]# sendmail -qtime
Invalid time unit `t'
Invalid time unit `i'
Invalid time unit `e'

In any case, this is the primary mail exchanger for our site-- it sees
over 50K messages a day, so I know it's passing traffic. There's just
a lot of old stuff that's stuck in the queue.

> Try running the queue manually with:
> sendmail -qf -v -d60.1 -d8.8
> The debugging flags do:
> -d60.1 Show database lookups
> -d8.8 Show DNS query requests and problems
>
> If all the mail gets delivered or bounced, then that would point
> to a missing queue daemon or a queue daemon looking in the wrong
> place.

Did that, there are still 6K ancient messages in the queue.

> You can also verify your queue timeout with:
> grep Timeout.queuereturn= /etc/mail/sendmail.cf
>
> The default is 5 days.

That's set correctly.

> Hope this s
>
It did-- I'm just trying to figure out what the cause of this stuff
is-- if it's okay to blow away the queue, great, I'll research how to
do it, but I'd rather not fry legitimate mail...