Queue control?

[Scott Silva]

Glenn Steen spake the following on 9/15/2007 2:42 AM:
> 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
Since Hotmail is Microsoft, he will probably have to stand in line for the 
legal action.
I would just block hotmail.com in the access file (sendmail) and re-enable it 
after a few days when they expire and fail the messages.

-- 

MailScanner is like deodorant...
You hope everybody uses it, and
you notice quickly if they don't!!!!