Queue control?

[G. Armour Van Horn]

Glenn Steen wrote:
> On 15/09/2007, G. Armour Van Horn <vanhorn at whidbey.com> wrote:
>   
>>  Doc Schneider wrote:
>>  -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>> Hash: SHA1
>>
>> G. Armour Van Horn wrote:
>>
>>
>>  Some unspeakable person flooded Hotmail with spam that looked like it
>> came from me overnight, and I'm struggling under the onslaught of error
>> messages. Hotmail is pumping the messages in, and as long as the load
>> average is under 12 the system is accepting them, but for the most part
>> they're just piling up and not being delivered to the local user.
>>
>> Earlier this afternoon there were so many files in mqueue.in that I
>> couldn't run ls to see how bad it was. I renamed the directory and
>> created a new one, and not it has over 12,000 files in it, which must
>> mean there are over 6,000 more messages waiting to be processed.
>>
>> I don't really want to read them all, but I do want to get them
>> processed so I can read the valid mail that is certainly hidden in there.
>>
>> I tried bumping the Max children from the default up to 20 to see if
>> that would force it to start delivering the mail, but that when my load
>> average hit 16 I stopped MailScanner. (I did "service MailScanner stop"
>> at a load average of just under 16, it didn't actually stop until the
>> load average had hit 25.) Obviously that wasn't the right approach, so
>> now I've set it down to 3 children which is keeping the memory use and
>> load average within reason, but it still isn't delivering any mail.
>>
>> Is there something I can do to force the system to devote at least some
>> resources to working through the queue instead of just piling it higher?
>>
>> Van
>>
>>
>>
>>  service MailScanner stop
>> service MailScanner startout (this will stop all incoming mail and will
>> just process mail being held in mqueue.in)
>>
>> HTH
>>
>> - --
>> - -Doc
>> Lincoln, NE.
>> http://www.genealogyforyou.com/
>> http://www.cairnproductions.com/
>>
>>  Actually, it looks to me like that just lets Sendmail process the mail
>> being held in mqueue. The problem is, there isn't anything there. If I
>> understand this correctly, it is MailScanner that takes the messages from
>> mqueue.in and moves them to mqueue, which is the part that isn't happening.
>>
>>  I tried to modify the "start" section of /etc/init.d/MailScanner to start
>> both the outbound Sendmail and MailScanner, but that wasn't as simple as I
>> hoped. Right now I'm moving massive chunks of mail from the mqueue.in (and
>> backups thereof) into mqueue, then using the "startout" option, which is
>> working. Tedious, but it's working.
>>     
>
> You can do as Doc suggests, then run check_MailScanner, which will
> start mailscanner... and start filling that outgoing queue.
>
>   
>>  Of course, if Hotmail has another million messages for me when I start the
>> standard MailScanner back up I don't know what I can do about it.
>>     
>
> You might want to temporarily blacklist the sending servers in you MTA
> or use an FW rule against them. One would think that the i....s would
> know to scan everything and not bounce bad things. Sigh. If it
> persists, one could seriously consider some form of action against
> them.... even legal...
>
> I, and probably everyone else here, sympathise with you/your situation....
>
> Cheers
>   
Another list member mailed me privately and suggested I add "Scan 
messages = no" to my Mailscanner.conf, which isn't how I normally want 
to run but it definitely sped things up. I also dropped the threshold in 
Sendmail for maximum load average for receiving mail. Sendmail defaults 
to cutting off incoming SMTP at a load average of 12, I dropped this to 
8, and then to 4, which throttled things down to where the queue was 
consistently shrinking.

When things were at their worst I was deleting the messages at the 
server through Webmin, although that put a fair load on the server. I 
took care of about 33,000 messages that way, and have picked up over 
28,000 in my normal error-handling e-mail client. There are roughly 
15,000 still on the server, and though it's slowed down dramatically 
since this afternoon, there are still more of the errors coming in. So 
with 75,000 so far, I'd expect it to hit 85,000 if the jerk doesn't run 
this again tomorrow.

Either his list was really, really bad, or it was really, really huge.

Van

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