Qmail is one of the famous open source email servers like postfix, sendemail, exim etc.
Today, got a qmail server which was very slow in sending emails. It took even 24 hours to send an email. Let us see here, how to solve this issue. Spam mails are the major reason on slowness of any email server. First we have to check the email queue to know how many mails are there to be processed. # /var/qmail/bin/qmail-qstat messages in queue: 23645 messages in queue but not yet preprocessed: 82 ooops. 23645 mails in the queue is a huge number. The next step is to use is “qmail-qread”, which can be used to read the message headers: # /var/qmail/bin/qmail-qread 18 Jul 2005 15:03:07 GMT #2996948 9073 <[email protected]> bouncing done remote [email protected] done remote [email protected] done remote [email protected] 23 Feb 2013 22:52:24 GMT #13633871 2239 <[email protected]> bouncing remote [email protected] done remote [email protected] done remote [email protected] done remote [email protected] remote [email protected] remote [email protected] .... I see here that there are many emails from the email address [email protected] where all the mails contain bogus TO address. So, all these mails are SPAM mails and can be deleted. Let us count how many spam mails are there. qmHandle is a nice tool to handle the email queue in the qmail. using this, we can list the queue, send all the mails in the queue, delete the mails using any field like sender, receiver, domain, subject, body text even using regular expression. options for qmandle -l to list the queue -s to summarize the queue -a to send all emails -fsender to delete emails from sender /usr/local/src/qmhandle-1.3.2/qmHandle -l | grep From | grep ef6276 | wc -l 22735 So, there are 22735 spam mails that are generated from single email address [email protected] Let us delete them all. /usr/local/src/qmhandle-1.3.2/qmHandle [email protected] It took some 30 min to delete all the spam emails. Let us check the queue status now. /usr/local/src/qmhandle-1.3.2/qmHandle -s Total messages: 910 Messages with local recipients: 0 Messages with remote recipients: 910 Messages with bounces: 10 Messages in preprocess: 0 So, there are 910 valid emails Let us try to send them all. /usr/local/src/qmhandle-1.3.2/qmHandle -a That's all. In some 30 minutes, all the valid emails are sent and the email server started to breath easily. Thanks to the following links which helped me to know about qmail. http://blog.xfloyd.net/?p=109 http://pc-freak.net/blog/how-to-fix-a-broken-qmail-queue-with-queue-repair-and-qmhandle/ http://linuxhostingsupport.net/blog/howto-manage-mail-queue-in-qmail-using-qmhandle http://lateral.netmanagers.com.ar/stories/8.html -- Regards, T.Shrinivasan My Life with GNU/Linux : http://goinggnu.wordpress.com Free/Open Source Jobs : http://fossjobs.in Get CollabNet Subversion Edge : http://www.collab.net/svnedge _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
