Topic: qmail error messages - any ideas?

[Nick Texidor]

Hi,

I've been having some problems with qmail.  

I first realised there was a problem when I noticed the modem lights continually sending, for over 24hrs!!!!!  I tried to use IPTraf to determine what was going on, but didn't get too far with that.  After a lot more hunting around through the log files, I found some records in one of the mail log files that were a bit suspicious.  Every 20 minutes or so, we were getting an incoming SMTP session from one particular person we deal with.  Apparently, they had sent an email a couple of days ago that never arrived.  It contained a JPG.  So I asked them to STUFF the jpg and try again, and it worked.  However, I can only assume the file they sent earlier is still trying to come through, and possibly some corruption is affecting it.   I thought that was the problem, until I checked the logs in /var/log/qmail, and now I have run into more problems!!!  :^)

1) it seems that the continual data lights on the modem were trying to send an email with a 4meg attachment to someone, but it wasn't going.  I ended up deleting this file and it appears to have resolved the problem, however, qmail-qstat still says there is 1 message waiting to be sent.

2) In /var/logs/mail/current there are a huge amount of error messages saying 'warning: trouble injecting bounce message. will try again later.  litterally hundreds of these in this file, and all the old files.   After some more playing, I deleted the files sitting in /var/qmail/queue/bounce, and the associated files in the info folder, and as if by magic, these messages stopped appearing in the log file.

3)  I installed the procmail e-smith script, and messages are appearing in the same /var/logs/qmail/current file that says 'delivery nn: success: procmail:_'Couldn't_create_"/var/spool/mail/nickt"/did_0+0+1/'  This message appears for almost all messages that are processed by procmail, yet the messages still appear to end up in my inbox.

Unfortunately, I don't know if I've affected other things by deleting some of these raw email messages from the queue.  Is there an easier way to see what messages are waiting in the queues, and removing offending ones?

Do I need to worry about that procmail error message?  Mails seem to continue arriving, but I don't know if it's something I need to be concerned about!

Sorry for my ramblings... I've spent the whole day trying to track down what has been using my bandwidth all day, and running into these error messages has me a little concerned that their may be an issue with my installation.

Thanks

Nick

[Cyrus Bharda]

Nick,

I have too come up with the same problem, and deleting the emails seems to do the trick, but is there any way of checking why they are getting stuck there?

Cyrus Bharda

[Michiel]

There is this neat little contrib that allows you to handle the outgoing mail queue from the server-manager: http://mirror.contribs.org/smeserver/contribs/saco/contrib/e-smith-qmHandle/. That should allow you to monitor and delete outgoing messages that are causing problems.

Michiel

[Cyrus Bharda]

Michiel,

Unfortunatly they do not show up in the queue for some reason? And there fore they do not show up in that contrib, already tried but goinging in and manually deleting them out of /var/qmail/queue/bounce seems to stop the message from appearing I might setup a cron job to clear it daily for easy correction, but it still does not answer the questions of will this break anything else and why are they getting stuck there?

Thanks for the suggestion though, muchly appreciated!

Cyrus Bharda