Large mail queues

[Joan Bryan]

Hello

We are a new user of mailscanner (3.04.01) since weds and are finding it
working well for us.

However we did have a few problems initially with very large mail queues
building up when we went live. (From our usual number of about 600 to 15500)

We did several things to improve matters and thought these might be of
interest to others in similar situations.

1. Changed the sleep(30) to sleep(2) (the delay time between mailscanner
selecting the next batch to process) in mailscanner. We were finding the
incoming mail building up faster than mailscanner could cope because of this
delay. It would be nice if this were a configurable parameter.

2. Once the queues had built up to this size things deteriorated further
because of problems unix has with large directory sizes, and this slowed
down mailscanner's ability to process the queue so we recreated the queues
from scratch and started afresh.

3. Sendmail change - this was not really anything to do with mailscanner,
but it helped the faster delivery of local mail. We started an additional
sendmail process for the output queue with parameter of -qRkcl (where kcl is
our local domain) to process local mail.

4.  The -q1m parameter on sendmail was used (as suggested in the FAQ).

Joan


Joan Bryan
C&IT Services
Unix System Team
King's College London
020 7848 2671
mailto:joan.bryan at kcl.ac.uk