load ans que problem

[Raymond Dijkxhoorn]

Hi!

> I think the problem is that sendmail is having trouble stating all the
> messages and is being kept busy trying to get them all out
> I see that a lot of the messages are from spam sources that I send back
> and either time out or cannot be delivered.

Thats a problem with your MTA, sendmails queue mechanism is taking a lot
of time to read them in, if you are interested i have a little script,
pretty nasty, that will clean out your mail queue. It will remove
MAILER-DEAMON mails, thats most likely the ones that are holding up now.

> How can I get rid of say all messages older than three days or have
> sendmail time out the messages quicker?

You can define that in your sendmail config.

You need to define the values in the sendmail.cf

Standard its like:

O Timeout.queuereturn=5d

You can lower those to for example 3 days.

> Is there another way of rooting out the offenders?
> I really have a serius problem here

Relatively :) Ive seen systems with much more in the queue then this.

I will mail the script i use, let me know if it solved your problem.

Bye,
Raymond.