james unusable because of delivery failures to postmaster. Configurationproblem?

[Jerome Lacoste @ BBC]

I've setup james 2.1 a couple of weeks ago for our internal use. I've found out that my installation is now unusable as james is now looping on itself trying to deliver error messages without success.

The /opt/mysql/data/james/spool.MYD file takes more than 200 Mo and /opt/james/apps/james/var/mail/error contains 36752 files!

A quick look to the contents of these emails show me that james tries and fails to send mail to the postmaster, defined as "deesse-admin@localhost". There is a user called deesse-admin on the box, and a mail user called deesse-admin created using the administrative commands (using telnet).

I think the following happened: an email was sent to the James SMTP server with a 'To' field containing an external address. Failing to do that, james tried to send an email to the postmaster. This failed as well and triggered a new mail to the postmaster Thus the exponential problem.

[There should perhaps be something to preventing a loop there.]

Note: sendmail is not installed as I didn't want to create a conflict with james. Is that the reason for the failure?

Any ideas on how to fix the problem?
I tried changing the postmaster address and restart james without luck.
I can uncomment the mailet that notifies the postmaster in case of problems, but I don't think it is the correct solution, neither that it will have effect at that stage.
I've had a look to the "James and sendmail document" but that doens't seem to be what I want.

I am new to james, so do not hesitate to give me some details.

For information the machine is a PIV 1.7 with 256 Mo and 512 SWAP, running Mandrake 9.0.
Self installed applications include:
- mysql 4.0.6 gamma (yes I know I should upgrade).
- james 2.1
- SDK 1.4


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