My question today is not application specific. We have in and outbound gateway servers cleaning mail before it gets to our mailbox servers. The outbound servers have almost 200,000 messages sitting in the retry queue (2 days).
This is a disastrous situation for any OS, any filesystem, ime, but it's a worse disaster for Windows filesystem and Imail single-directory queue.
We receive about 300,000 inbound daily. Most of this appears to be spam messages that got past the inbound gateway servers and is being bounced due to:
300k msgs, I would estimate base on other systems of similar volume that I admin, would be 200k to 250k is spam.
The only sane policies is for your MX gateway:
1) to reject all msgs to unknown recipients,
2) to reject so many garbage msgs to your known recipients from reaching your mailbox server
A non-defensive "pass through" MX gateway that implements few or no policies is basically an exercise in futility, a waste of time.
I would very much like to not send (or try for 2 days) these messages. How can I filter on my outbound gateway server to drop these?
Can your outbound server do such filtering and message discarding?
I need to send legitimate bounces (recipient not found)
error. As I said above, you should never let such volumes of mail to unknown recipients get past your MX gateway to be rejected by your mailbox server. Probably 99% of these msgs are from spammers forging [EMAIL PROTECTED], so you situation is totally insane:
1.) you accepted 200K msgs at your gateway for recipients that did not exist
2) now you're stuck with a flooded-with-crap gateway that must generate another 200K new mailer-daemon msgs to notify the probably forged sender that the recipient does not exist.
3) there is a a good chance that your are now an accomplice, as in "guilty", in a joe-job, propagating mail abuse that came into your server back towards other innocent servers.
To fix your situation, you'll need to identify text strings in the msgs you want to delete, search all the 200k msgs to identify the queue files that contain those strings, and then delete the queue files.
if <msg file> contains <string>, delete <msg file>.
To prevent your situation, above all for volumes such as yours where IMail + add-ons are typically straining to keep up even on expensive hardware, run a defensive, recipient-aware MX gateway like IMGate. The crap does not enter your systems and you don't reflect it back to innocent servers. Plus you have hours less admin to do (like what you are faced with now), your mailbox server runs much faster, and your users are happier.
Len
_____________________________________________________________________ http://MenAndMice.com/DNS-training: London; San Jose IMGate.MEIway.com: anti-spam gateway, effective on 1000's of sites, free
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