Still stuck in queue, version 4.52.2

[Jim Holland]

Hi

On Thu, 6 Apr 2006, Max Kipness wrote:

> I've since upgraded to version 4.52.2, and I'm getting better
> performance (probably less getting stuck in the queue), yet yesterday
> there was one message that got processed over 6000 times!
> 
> Here is a sample of one that is stuck right now. It's been processed 512
> times. Any clue to what else I can do to remedy this issue?
 
I wish I knew the cause of this problem.  I regularly come across this
issue, but fortunately at long intervals (a couple of months or more
between each occurrence) with all the versions of MailScanner that I have
used (currently 4.50.10-1 - just about to install 4.52.2).  When I come
across stuck mail I generally find that the whole of the associated batch
of up to 30 messages tend to have the same problem of being endlessly
reprocessed.  My fix is to remove the first message of the batch from
mqueue.in and then try to process the rest of the batch.  If that fails
then I remove the next one, and so on until I have identified the problem
message.  I then return the remaining messages to the queue and finally
convert the d and q files of the problem message to a standard RFC822
message file, scan it with clamscan, and if it OK I then move the d and q
files to mqueue to bypass MailScanner.  It works, but I would like to get
to the bottom of the problem.

In several such cases I noticed that the message contained a zip file 
together with another file.  In almost all cases the message was over 500 
KB in size (but as we regularly handle messages of up to 1.5 MB that is 
not in itself a particular problem).  On other occasions it was just a 
large pps file.

I never see any specific error message in the maillog file (I was using
sendmail 8.13.1 before the upgrade to 8.13.6) - it reports that a
message has been processed by MailScanner but there is no corresponding 
delivery notice.  All the problem mail has been incoming to our users.

Regards

Jim Holland
System Administrator
MANGO - Zimbabwe's non-profit e-mail service