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

[Peter Valian]

What is your prefered MTA?  Is there an MTA that is NFS-friendly?

Nick Phillips wrote:

> 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.
>


--
Peter Valian
Network & Systems Administrator
Southwestern University
Georgetown, Texas
512.863.1586 office
512.863.1605 fax
--