"Syntax error in Postfix queue file"?

[Glenn Steen]

On 07/03/2008, John Baker <johnnyb at marlboro.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>  Something seemed to go wrong at some point this week and I keep getting
>  this Mailscanner error in my syslog.
>
>  Syntax error in Postfix queue file, didn't start with a C record
>
>  Running qshape hold gives me this
>
>  Use of uninitialized value in subtraction (-) at /usr/sbin/qshape line 251.
>
>  That section looks like this.
>
>     246 # bucket 0 is the total over all the buckets.
>      247 # buckets 1 to $bnum contain the age breakdown.
>      248 #
>      249 sub bucket {
>      250     my ($qt, $now) = @_;
>      251     my $m = ($now - $qt) / (60 * $tick);
>      252     return 1 if ($m < 1);
>      253     my $b = $opts{"l"} ? int($m+1) : 2 + int(log($m) / log(2));
>      254     $b < $bnum ? $b : $bnum;
>      255 }
>
>  I'm not really sure what's happened here. Does anybody have any ideas?
>
>  Something is wrong with the ques yet mail actually does seem to be going
>  through the server.

What does "postqueue -p" (a.k.a. mailq) have to say? Basically what
seems to be happening is that you have a very invalid (possibly non-)
queue file in hold, that MailScanner drops from the batch every time
it gets "eligible" for pickup. Look in the hold queue, probably at one
of the oldest files... Can you "postcat" them?

That mail still flows is because MS successfully drops it from the batch.

Cheers
-- 
-- Glenn
email: glenn < dot > steen < at > gmail < dot > com
work: glenn < dot > steen < at > ap1 < dot > se