Mail Not Delivering --REALLY BAD!!

[Glenn Steen]

On 12/11/06, Mailing Lists <lists at gmnet.net> wrote:
> I think this points to the problem...
>
> in my /var/log/maillog I get tons of these...
>
> Nov 11 22:44:45 pipe MailScanner[12837]: Batch: Found invalid qf queue
> file for message k9HDF4fq030592
>
> Does anybody know what this means??
>
> Thanks for your help!!
> Rick
>
It might indicate that you are using one type of locking in Sendmail
and another in MailScanner, so that MailScanner starts reading before
the file is really finished being written. Might cause all sorts of
problems. (In "MailScanner speak" the locking types are called posix
(for fcntl() ...) and flock (for flock:-). At about version 8.12.11,
there was a shift in Sendmail locking (for linux) from flock to
posix/fcntl ... And newer versions of MailScanner has moved from the
default assumption that flock is right for sendmail to the assumption
that posix is right (you can be explicit about this).

So what to do might be very much dependant on what happened on that
Friday. Did you upgrade sendmail? Likely your MailScanner needs have
Lock Type set to posix (assuming an "elderly" MailScanner)... If it
was an update of MailScanner, you might need set it to "flock", to
match an older sendmail...

But there has been an interesting idea "aired" already... After
stopping MailScanner, are there any MailScanner processes lingering?
There should be none, and it should definitely not be logging anything
after you had stopped it. If there are such processes, try just
killing them off, check that they die, then fire up MailScanner again.
-- 
-- Glenn
email: glenn < dot > steen < at > gmail < dot > com
work: glenn < dot > steen < at > ap1 < dot > se