Tell MailScanner to stop incoming mail

Richard Lynch rich at mail.wvnet.edu
Sat Aug 27 15:20:43 IST 2011


Michael Masse wrote:
> I'm having performance issues on one of my incoming email servers, and 
> while I'm trying to figure out the root of that problem I need to be 
> able to tell MailScanner to stop accepting incoming mail so that it 
> can get caught up on the email it has already accepted and queued 
> up.   I have multiple servers running w/ this mx record, so senders 
> should just find a different server to send to automatically if this 
> one stops accepting.    It appears to me that MailScanner starts a 
> secondary sendmail process specifically just for receiving email vs 
> sending, so hopefully there's some sort of startup command that would 
> allow me to not accept new email.    I've tried just blocking port 25 
> from the outside on this server specifically via iptables, and it does 
> prevent outside systems from sending mail, it also keeps MailScanner 
> from properly processing queued up mail for some reason.      Any help 
> would be greatly appreciated.
>  
> -Mike
>  
What I do on RHEL/CentOS is...

service sendmail stop
service MailScanner startout

...then when I'm ready to start accepting inbound mail again...

service MailScanner startin


Rich

-- 

Obstacles are those frightening things we see when we take
our eyes off our goal.

Henry Ford




More information about the MailScanner mailing list