Process mqueue.in

[Julian Field]

At 17:45 07/10/2002, you wrote:
>Thanks for the info but it did not do anything in my case (mailscanner
>was stopped). Perhaps I don't have a full understanding of what
>mqueue.in holds. I believe these are mails that arrived and should be
>placed in the user's mailboces, right? If so, is this something sendmail
>does or is this what procmail is for? I assume that the command you sent
>is supposed to send these mails to the other sendmail instance to scan
>and place in the mail boxes. What I don't understand is that all other
>mails are moving through, why would these be stuck?

The incoming sendmail process dumps messages in mqueue.in and does nothing
else with them.
MailScanner should then pick them up (subject to a few checks for things
like 0 length files and qf files with no corresponding df file). It
processes them, then dumps then in mqueue and (optionally) tells the
outgoing sendmail process they are there.
The outgoing sendmail process picks them up (whether it was told about them
or not) and delivers them. It may invoke procmail to deliver them, but
that's entirely up to sendmail and is nothing to do with MailScanner.

So if you have thousands of qf+df pairs of files in your mqueue.in, and
they aren't zero-length, then something is wrong.

You can force delivery of these, bypassing MailScanner altogether for these
messages, with the command
         sendmail -oQ/var/spool/mqueue.in -q -v
Be warned, this will be very verbose. If you want it to run silently,
remove the "-v". It will run through the entire mqueue.in once and then
stop, trying to deliver each message in turn.

If qf+df pairs of files are still collecting in mqueue.in, but all 3 of
         1) incoming sendmail
         2) MailScanner
         3) outgoing sendmail
are all running, then something is wrong that is causing MailScanner to
miss these incoming messages. If this is the case, you might want to post
me your mailscanner.conf file so I can sanity check it for you.

>Chris Campbell wrote:
>>sendmail -oQ/var/spool/mqueue.in -q -v
>>
>>That is what I replied last time...not sure if that is what you are looking
>>for thought.
>>make sure mailscanner is off when you do this though.
>>======================
>>
>>I know this has been discussed before but I could not find the
>>information in the mailing list archive, nor in my mailbox. And it's
>>also a sendmail problem but maybe someone knows what to do.
>>
>>Yesterday afternoon I noticed that my server had a few thousand mails
>>stacked up in mqueue.in but I cant'figure out how to move them out (nor
>>do I know what caused the to stack up). What's the procedure for moving
>>them out to the mailboxes?

--
Julian Field                Teaching Systems Manager
jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk         Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science
Tel. 023 8059 2817          University of Southampton
                             Southampton SO17 1BJ