Thanks for all the suggestions. I've learned something. But I used James Gray's early suggestion: rename the mqueue directory, create another with the same ownership and permissions, and restart sendmail. Everything seems to be working OK.
May not have been quite as cool a solution as some of the others, but if it's working ... On 29 Jun 2004 at 15:09, Ben Lisle wrote: > > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf > > Of Edwin Humphries > > Sent: Tuesday, 29 June 2004 11:16 AM > > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Subject: [SLUG] Flooded mail queue > > > > WE have a sendmail installation that is trying to process a queue of > > some 1.8 million emails - mostly, as far as I can tell, double > > bounce, virus laden stuff. > > Ouch :-) > > > Of course, sendmail is going into overload, and slowing the machine > > down enormously, and given that the emails are double-bounce, to no > > avail. But i tried to delete the queue with "rm *" in > > /var/spool/mqueue, but got "Argument list too long". > > > > Can I just delete the mqueue directory? If so, will sendmail re- > > create it on the fly, or do I need to manually re-create it? > > Try this... > > Locate the offending spammer IP addresses then run... > > find . -name 'qf*' -type f |xargs grep -l $ip |sed s/qf/df/g |xargs rm > find . -name 'qf*' -type f |xargs grep -l $ip |xargs rm > > That should clean your queue while leaving those legitimate messages > that are just waiting for delivery. > > > Edwin Humphries, > > Ironstone Technology Pty Ltd > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > www.ironstone.com.au > > Phone: 02 4233 2285 > > Fax: 02 4233 2299 > > Mobile: 0419 233 051 > > -- > > SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ > > Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html > > --- > Ben Lisle > Pacific Internet | Engineer, IT Operations > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > -- > SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ > Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html Edwin Humphries, Ironstone Technology Pty Ltd [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ironstone.com.au Phone: 02 4233 2285 Fax: 02 4233 2299 Mobile: 0419 233 051 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
