Problems with inbound mail queue

[Mike Kercher]

MailScanner mailing list <> scribbled on Monday, August 29, 2005 6:52 AM:

>> I am not sure if this is a mailwatch or mailscanner
> problem, so I am
>> posting it to both forums.
>> I am having a considerable amount of emails building up in
> the inbound
>> mailq.
>> As of this morning there are 238 messages in there. There does not
>> seems to be anything wrong with the messages, some are spam
> and others are not.
>> They do not appear to have been processed at all, just
> hanging around
>> in the queue.
>> Mailscanner sees the messages, but does not process them. Here is a
>> snippet of Logs; Aug 29 07:34:48 europa MailScanner[22046]:
> New Batch:
>> Found 239 messages waiting Aug 29 07:34:48 europa
> MailScanner[22046]:
>> New Batch: Scanning 1 messages, 3335 bytes Aug 29 07:34:49 europa
>> MailScanner[22046]: MCP Checks: Starting Aug 29 07:34:49 europa
>> MailScanner[22046]: MCP Checks completed at
>> 3335 bytes per second
>> Aug 29 07:34:49 europa MailScanner[22046]: Spam Checks: Starting
>> 
>> 
>> I read some other posts about this and some people are just
> deleting
>> them and purging the from the DB, but this does not seem to be a
>> "solution" but a way to manage the problem.
>> Does anyone know what the "fix" is? This problem did not
> start until I
>> upgraded to Mailwatch 1.0.2 and MailScanner 4.4.6-1. It was
> installed
>> from RPM on Redhat 9 running Sendmail 8.13.3-1. Mailwatch
> is running
>> with Apache 2.0.52 and php 5.0.3-1.
>> 
>> Any ideas, anyone?
> 
> I'm also seeing this, but only on one server. Other
> mailscanners are working correctly, and they are using the
> same versions. I really do not know what the problem is. I
> compared all the config files, etc but they are all the same.
> The only difference is that the 'problematic' machine is
> Fedora Core 3, and the other 'working' machines are RHEL 3
> and Fecora Core 4.
> 
> Though, by us the email seems to be delivered, but they're
> still standing in the mqueue.in/ folder.
> 
> If there are a lot of mails in there, the load of the
> mailserver keeps getting higher and higher, so I copy the
> folder to an backupfolder and empty the /var/spool/mqueue.in/
> folder, so the load returns to normal and I have still an
> copy of the email (just in case).
> 

I had a similar problem on an RHEL3 box.  I had my High Scoring Spam Action
set to delete and at certain times, the same messages would get processed
over and over again...driving the system load higher and higher.  I ended up
changing my High Scoring Spam Actions = forward dev_null at doma.ain and I have
an alias in /etc/aliases that sends dev_null@ to /dev/null.  I've never seen
that problem since.

Mike

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