Topic: Newbie Question - 53000 in mail queue

[ptomlinuk]

we're having big problems with spam and originally had all mail going to a user on our network so we didn't miss any mails, then we realised with 1000's of SPAM mails coming in every day this was a bad idea, so what we did is to return them to the sender however i think some of these are getting caught in a loop and causing an increase in traffic and thus slowing down the outbound mails we're trying to send to our customers.

i've now created a seperate mail box for these spam mails to be delivered to however i want to clear the outbound mail queue

any ideas on how to do this i can't see how to do it in the web front end and don't know which folder the files might be in

Any help would be appreciated

Paul

[smeghead]

Look in /var/qmail/queue, here you will find the mail spool folders and all those garbage messages.

There is an app that you can install to remove messages one by one (within the SME server manager) called e-smith-qmHandle-1.0.0-7.noarch.rpm (packaged by Darrell May I think). It can also be used at the command line for batch work:

[root@kryten queue]# qmHandle
qmHandle v1.0.0
by Michele Beltrame

Wrong parameters entered, available ones are:
  -l   : list message queues
  -L   : list local message queue
  -R   : list remote message queue
  -s   : show some statistics
  -vN  : display message number N
  -dN  : delete message number N
  -D   : delete all messages in the queue (local & remote)
Additional (optional) parameters are:
  -c   : display colored output
  -N   : list message numbers only
         (to be used either with -l, -L or -R)

You can view/delete multiple message eg -d123 -v456 -d567

Just be careful as once deleted the messages are gone.

I actually do this manually but its tedious; no mail gets lost tho.

Make a point of stopping smtpfront-qmail before you do this and restarting afterwards (or reboot).

HTH

[ptomlinuk]

Thanks for that

Paul

[ptomlinuk]

Hi guys, thanks for you help earlier, I have managed to remove the mail messages from the message queue, but when I go to send/recieve from my mail client I recieve an error saying that the smtp server terminated the connection unexpectedly, I can telnet on to port 25 but I cannot successfully send a mail (i think my SMTP service is broke)

Any suggestions would really be appreciated.

[smeghead]

.. my guess is you haven't restarted smtpfront-qmail!

If you have and a reboot doesn't fix things then pop over to:

http://www.qcc.ca/~charlesc/software/queue_repair/index.html

and get this package.  It does an execellent job of verifying your qmail config and optionally repairing it (if req).

HTH