Question

Force QMAIL to send mail in QUEUE

Asked by: TAMSCODAN

How can i force QMAIL to send all the old messages out in the queue?

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Asked On
2009-01-28 at 13:15:23ID24092478
Topics

Qmail Email Server

,

SendMail Email Server

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
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Answers

 

by: jar3817Posted on 2009-01-28 at 19:28:14ID: 23494093

1. Run the qmail-tcpok binary
    # /full/path/to/qmail-tcpok

2. Find the PID of the qmail-send process:
    # ps -ef | grep qmail-send

3. Send an alarm signal to that process (pid is the process id found in step 2):
    # kill -s ALRM pid

After that the qmail-send process will try to empty the mail queue.

 

by: TAMSCODANPosted on 2009-01-29 at 06:35:17ID: 23497715

I tried the solution however the the mailq is still holding old mail. Any other possibilities?

 

by: jar3817Posted on 2009-01-29 at 07:35:42ID: 23498450

Is it hold all mail, or just certain messages? After sending the alarm, look at the logs to see if a reason is given for the mail failing to send.

 

by: TAMSCODANPosted on 2009-01-29 at 08:16:48ID: 23498966

looks like alot of junk in it? how do i remove it?

 

by: it4sohoPosted on 2009-02-11 at 10:06:12ID: 23614108

My guess is that your queue messages are junk that cannot be delivered (is being rejected by the receiving host). I would say you have 3 options:

1) Just let the message(s) die their natural death (after /var/qmail/control/queuelifetime seconds)
2) Temporarily reduce the value in /var/qmail/control/queuelifetime to something like 300 (that's about 5 minutes), then stop qmail-send (pick your poison there) and re-start it. Once restarted, qmail-send (which only reads its config files when it starts) will see that the messages are too old, will try one last time to send them, then remove them (via qmail-clean) when the "last ditch delivery effort" fails.
3) You can be REALLY anal about it and just manually clear the queue. There is a script available online, but it boils down to:

#! /bin/ksh
echo Cleaning Queue
# remove the lock file so there is no access to the queue while we're meddling
mv /var/qmail/queue/lock /root/
# remove ALL files out of the queue -- careful, this may take a while!
find /var/qmail/queue -type f -exec rm -f {} \;
# restore the lock file so we can queue/de-queue files again
mv /root/lock /var/qmail/queue/

QMail actually usually does a very good job of keeping the queue clean... if you've got a lot of dead messages in there, you may be accidentally acting as an OPEN RELAY (and are getting a lot of SPAM run through you), or one of your users may have a worm/virus infection spreading SPAM. There is a FREE check for open-relay mail systems at http://www/spamhelp.org/shopenrelay.

If there are a lot of messages stuck in there, you may want to GREP them for the sender and look to that user for why mail is backing up.

I hope this helps!

Dan
IT4SOHO


20120131-EE-VQP-002

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