Mqueue.in just keeps growing...

[Kevin Miller]

snip

>So is there anyway that I can get the performance set so that it 
>catches up with this mail? It's been working fine for over a year. 
>The incoming mail content, especially spam has probably increased 
>quite a bit, but just last week when I checked the queues 
>everything was very low and normal. I can't imagine why a reboot 
>has made the server perform less.

> Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

There are a couple of things that you may be able to do quite easily.
You don't say what MTA you're using, but in sendmail you can add a greet
pause line in your sendmail.mc file:

	FEATURE(`greet_pause',  `10000')dnl

That one thing that really helped me drop a *lot* of spam before it was
even received.  When a connection is made, it basically says "hold
please" for 10 seconds.  Legitimate MTAs don't have a problem w/that
(some mail admins do - tough <g>) but spambots generally will just move
on to the next message.  I'm sure there's an equivilent in Postfix if
you're using that instead.

I'm not using it, but rate throttle may be helpful too.  IIRC, that
looks at how many inbound emails you're getting from a given user in a
given amount of time, and if it exceeds it, the MTA throttles back what
it will accept from that host.

Also, you might set up MailScanner to us a tmpfs for processing mail if
you have sufficient ram.  See the tmpfs section on this page:
http://wiki.mailscanner.info/doku.php?id=maq:index&s=tmpfs

Good luck...

...Kevin
--
Kevin Miller                Registered Linux User No: 307357
CBJ MIS Dept.               Network Systems Admin., Mail Admin.
155 South Seward Street     ph: (907) 586-0242
Juneau, Alaska 99801        fax: (907 586-4500