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Glenn Steen wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:223f97700709150242g46b3d9bfq2fe4d83a634354b1@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">On 15/09/2007, G. Armour Van Horn <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:vanhorn@whidbey.com"><vanhorn@whidbey.com></a> wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap=""> Doc Schneider wrote:
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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.
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.genealogyforyou.com/">http://www.genealogyforyou.com/</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.cairnproductions.com/">http://www.cairnproductions.com/</a>
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.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
You can do as Doc suggests, then run check_MailScanner, which will
start mailscanner... and start filling that outgoing queue.
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap=""> 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.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
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
</pre>
</blockquote>
Another list member mailed me privately and suggested I add "Scan
messages = no" to my Mailscanner.conf, which isn't how I normally want
to run but it definitely sped things up. I also dropped the threshold
in Sendmail for maximum load average for receiving mail. Sendmail
defaults to cutting off incoming SMTP at a load average of 12, I
dropped this to 8, and then to 4, which throttled things down to where
the queue was consistently shrinking.<br>
<br>
When things were at their worst I was deleting the messages at the
server through Webmin, although that put a fair load on the server. I
took care of about 33,000 messages that way, and have picked up over
28,000 in my normal error-handling e-mail client. There are roughly
15,000 still on the server, and though it's slowed down dramatically
since this afternoon, there are still more of the errors coming in. So
with 75,000 so far, I'd expect it to hit 85,000 if the jerk doesn't run
this again tomorrow.<br>
<br>
Either his list was really, really bad, or it was really, really huge. <br>
<br>
Van<br>
<br>
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