[Fwd: mail delay and can't parse message]

[Nick Phillips]

On Wed, Apr 03, 2002 at 03:13:26PM -0600, Peter Valian wrote:

> However, Im getting many calls from users claiming that some email is
> delayed by several hours.  I have not personally witnessed this
> phenomenon but it's more than just a couple users making this
> claim...(they claim to receive mail as normal but then every now and
> again get a message timestamped before several emails they have already
> received.  I don't know if the problem is with Mailscanner/Sendmail or
> with Qpopper (4.0.3).

You need to have a look at the messages in question, and see where the
delay is actually occuring, if indeed it is (you often find that if the
sending system has its clock set wrong then it appears at first to have
been delayed, but when you look at the headers, you see that in fact there
has probably been no delay).

> Also, several warnings a day get sent to postmaster about 'could not
> parse message xxx, e.g.
>   Report: Could not parse message g313LlZ19901
>
> I don't know if these messages just got dropped or went through or what.

Try it or check your logs; I can't remember off the top of my head what
the answer is...

> attached is my conf.  One thing that's special to our set up is that the
> mail spools are NFS mounted...so perhaps some file locking issues?

Since you appear to be running sendmail, it's probably a bad idea to run
with the spools NFS mounted, as so far as I am aware:

1) Sendmail uses flock();
2) flock() is not NFS-safe.

I'm not too hot on the details of this though, as sendmail is not my preferred
MTA.



Cheers,


Nick

--
Nick Phillips -- nwp at lemon-computing.com
Tomorrow, you can be anywhere.