Urgent: MailScanner apparently stopped processing...

Julian Field mailscanner at ecs.soton.ac.uk
Fri May 9 08:46:37 IST 2003


At 19:25 08/05/2003, you wrote:
>I'm hoping someone can shed some light on this one - recently I had
>MailScanner which I've implemented on RedHat 8 w/Postfix just yesterday,
>abruptly stop processing mail.
>
>I only happened to notice as the only indication was that no mail was
>passing through to my internal mail/pop servers, etc.
>
>When I checked the maillog I found only entries from the postfix demon
>that receives incoming mail, nothing from MailScanner or the postfix demon
>that then delivers what MailScanner gives it. All processes including the
>MailScanner processes were running - in fact, MailScanner was using a
>majority of cpu time. I tried manually starting up MailScanner and found
>that this fact of "MailScanner starting" and "xxx messages found to be
>scanned" did show up in the maillog, however, no other change, mail did
>not start to flow.
>
>I finally restarted the server and then everything started to move.

But was it scanning after you restarted?

Have you use redhat-switchmail-nox to set which email system RedHat thinks
it is trying to run?

>So, based on this I have a few questions:
>
>1. Any ideas why this happened and how can I prevent it and also does
>anyone have any scripts out there that detect this kindof thing and then
>cleanly shut down mailscanner and restart it?
>
>2. I realized I don't even know how to cleanly shut down MailScanner
>manually. This may seem a stupid question but if someone could answer it
>that would be great.

service MailScanner stop

You can do "service MailScanner" to get a list of the command options you
can give it.
Does "service MailScanner start" work cleanly, or does it output any errors?

>4. I have an error message repeatedly showing up in the maillog that I
>have been unable to discover the cause of. It is:
>smtp MailScanner[xxxx]: Batch: Found invalid queue file for message xxxxxx

For some reason it thinks one of your incoming queue files is corrupt. It
needs to be able to find the sender and recipient addresses, and the last
hop IP address, in the file it lifts from the queue.

Can you send me one of the files from /var/spool/postfix.in/deferred that
exhibits this problem.
Then I can improve the Postfix parser to stop it happening again.
--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
MailScanner thanks transtec Computers for their support



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