Mailscanner: "Making attempt # at processing message"

[Jason Voorhees]

Hi all:

I'm running CentOS 5.5 x86 and MailScanner 4.82.6-1. Today I found
that my postfix queue was big (+700 messages when normal is  50) and
no messages were being delivered. I noticed that MailScanner wasn't
analyzing any message because it seemd to be stuck with some of them
with messages like these in my logs:


MailScanner[24297]: Making attempt 2 at processing message AA2081E2003C.AFC50
MailScanner[24875]: Making attempt 2 at processing message 1E7811E202FD.AAAC3
MailScanner[24297]: Making attempt 2 at processing message 895CA1E20210.ABD5B
MailScanner[24297]: Making attempt 2 at processing message E2D481E202A3.AE77B
MailScanner[24297]: Making attempt 2 at processing message B83001E202C5.AD53E
MailScanner[24297]: Making attempt 2 at processing message 1C12E1E20207.A9661
MailScanner[24938]: Making attempt 2 at processing message 062A31E202FE.A94F7
MailScanner[24938]: Making attempt 3 at processing message CE9041E202FF.AA005
MailScanner[24923]: Making attempt 2 at processing message 5F3701E202FC.A5CC7
MailScanner[24967]: Making attempt 2 at processing message 1E7811E202FD.AAAC3

I have seen this kinf of messages before and according to Julian's
recommendation in other threads, I deleted
/var/spool/MailScanner/incoming/Processing.db even
/var/spool/MailScanner/incoming/Processing.db-journal too, then
restared MS but the problem wasn't solved. I tried this more than 5 or
6 with no success.

So I finally decided too look for those extrange messages that
apparently were making MS to crash and deleted them from
/var/spool/postfix/hold:

# grep -E 'attempt.*[[:upper:][:digit:]]{12}' /var/log/maillog| awk '{
print $12 }' | cut -d . -f 1 | while read ID; do rm -fv
/var/spool/postfix/hold/${ID}; done

and a lot of messages (I don't remember how many) were deleted, then
MS started to analyze other messages without problems decreasing the
amount of queued mail.

The big question is: how can I know in a production system what's the
problem with some messages that causes MS to stop working?

I hope someone can help me.

Thanks