Thx to Lucio Chiappetti, Larry Griffith and Steve VanDevender. They
basically adviced to clean /var/spool/mqueue , and Steve also mentioned a
configuration error and Larry , a mail loop. I will check it. Here is a
quote from Lucio and my original question is also below:
On Thu, 25 Nov 1999, Lucio Chiappetti wrote:
> On Wed, 24 Nov 1999, Mirat Satoglu wrote:
>
> > Our box is busy with trying to process the sendmail queue which is full
> > of e-mails for our non-existent subdomains/servers since last month.
> > They will not be alive again and so i dont want my box to try to process
> > emails for them. Any ideas?
>
> Do you want to DELETE the old e-mails, or to REDIRECT them to a new address ?
>
> In both cases I'd suggest what follows :
>
> (1) issue a "mailq" command to know the list of the entire queue, and
> save its output (just in case there is a mixture of valid mails and
> mails to the old non-existent address)
>
> (2) /sbin/init.d/sendmail stop
>
> (3) cd /var/spool/mqueue
> ls
>
> you will find a bunch of couples of files dfXXXnnnnn and qfXXXnnnnn
> where XXXnnnnn refers to the mail id in the mailq output.
>
> (4) if you want to REDIRECT the mails, edit the qf files. The format of
> those may depend on the sendmail version you run. There will be a
> number of lines, one of which will start with R or RPFD and contain
> the delivery address. There will also be a bunch of lines starting
> with H, corresponding to the e-mail header. You can leave alone the
> H lines, but you can edit the R line with the new address.
>
> (5) if you want to DELETE the mails, delete all the qf and df files
> (and any other prefixed file) whose XXXnnnn refers to an invalid
> mail as identified in step 1
>
> (6) /sbin/init.d/sendmail start
>
> I'd expect that a restart will also rescan the queue immediately.
> If this is not the case, you can at any time rescan the queue with
>
> /usr/lib/sendmail -v -q
>
> (in principle if you want to redirect you can do this after step 4
> even without stopping sendmail. I sometimes do it for changed addresses.
> But if you have MANY mails in the queue, it's safer to do the edit
> while sendmail is not running.
>
Received on Fri Nov 26 1999 - 08:56:32 NZDT