Dealing with Orphaned queue files

[James Gray]

On 22/09/2006, at 12:50 PM, Errol Neal wrote:

> I'm running mailscanner-4.54.6-1 on centos. Sendmail 8.13.6
> I'm seeing a lot of orphaned queue files in /var/spool/mqueue.in. How
> can I prevent from happening?

Despite having the correct lock type in my sendmail boxes, I still  
seem to accumulate a few of these from time to time.  Usually when  
the system is under heavy load.  My solution was simply to write a  
script that hosed any queue files older than 5 days.  Less than that  
is dangerous as sendmail usually retries messages for four days - if  
you clean out queue files that are <5 days, you risk loosing  
legitimate messages.

Not a "clean" solution, but functional enough for more purposes.

Cheers,

James