On 11/10/2009 11:15 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
Hi Folks,
The current discussion re. Verizon blacklisting has been very
interesting in terms of log analysis suggestions. It leads me to ask
what seems to be a related question re. a problem I've been having lately.
Over the past couple of weeks I've seen my deferred queue get a LOT
larger than previously. I support a bunch of mailing lists, and have a
lot of addresses that date back more than a decade - so needless to say,
lots of spam comes our way, and gets weeded out. But we also get a lot
of bounceback error messages and such. Typically, I've found that, over
the course of a week, the deferred queue would grow - with most messages
timing out. When the queue grows to a couple of hundred messages, I've
gone in and emptied the queue using pfqueue - in the interests of
cutting down attempted retransmissions of messages that will simply
fail, but perhaps trigger spam blocking mechanisms on the receiving end.
The past couple of weeks, I've seen the deferred queue fill up with 500
or more messages over the course of a few hours - and I've found myself
deleting stuff daily.
Which prompts the question: Can anybody offer suggestions on how to
analyze the contents of the deferred queue - and particularly what to
look for that can be used to tune filters, postfix parameters, and so
forth?
Thanks very much,
Miles Fidelman
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
Use "mailq" to see what's being deferred, use "postcat" to
view the content of the message.
The general procedure is
- use mailq to see what's deferred
- use postcat to see where the mail originated
- if the message is a non-delivery notice, find where the
original message originated.
Sometimes deferrals are the result of the receiving system
just not accepting mail right now. You can't really do
anything about those except wait. They should be delivered
eventually.
If the deferrals are undeliverable bounces, find the source of
the original message that caused the bounce and don't accept
those any more.
If they are undeliverable bogus addresses in your mail lists,
you need to clean up your lists. I think most list software
has tools to help do this automatically; check the docs for
your list software or ask on a support channel dedicated to it.
-- Noel Jones
