From: Florian Mosleh (florian.moslehberndtgroup.net)
Date: Wed May 02 2007 - 10:08:40 CDT

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Hello,

This is my first post so I hope I'm not in violation of any policies.

I have been tasked with administering an instance of SUSE Linux Open
eXchange Server for the company I work for. We recently began to
experience painfully long delays for the delivery of outbound mail. This
was tested using accounts on various email hosting providers of various
stripes. In the process of diagnosing the issue, I discovered that the
version of Postfix that shipped with SLOX 4.1.1 is version 1.1.12:

foo:~ # postconf -d | grep version
mail_version = 1.1.12

Which essentially means that 'qshape' and the 'bounce_queue_lifetime
<http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#bounce_queue_lifetime>'
configuration directive are totally unavailable to me in a situation
that they were precisely made for. (yay!!)

The issue turned out to be a hideously bloated queue stack. A nicely
stuffed active queue being kept plump by a deferred queue full of bounce
notifications from spam returns and poorly maintained mailing list
analogs with no bounce checking. I eventually had to start manually
deleting messages from the deferred queue in order to bring some
semblance of functionality back to the email system.

The approach I used was something like this:
foo:~ #for i in `mailq | grep MAILER-DAEMON | grep -v "*" | awk '{print
$1}'`; do find /var/spool/postfix/deferred/ -name $i -exec rm -f {} \; ;
done

Which I will certainly be the first to admit, is a crude hack but, these
things become necessary when CEOs and VPs start glancing your way while
calmly musing to themselves what could ever be going on with the email
system.

The issue is cumulative and, the obvious answer is to upgrade the
version of postfix however, there is no secondary email server. I have
stressed the need for me to be given time and resources to rebuild the
mail server (preferably on a less self-integrated version of linux like
debian or maybe even openbsd) but, in the short term, I need a good way
of dealing with these bounces.

Can I just run my hack from cron every 15 minutes or so or, would I be
putting the stability of the email system at greater risk?

Thanks!

--
Florian Mosleh
Network and Systems Administrator
______________________

Always Thinking.

The Berndt Group
www.berndtgroup.net

3618 Falls Road, Suite 300
Baltimore, Maryland. 21211

email: florian.moslehberndtgroup.net
phone: 410-889-5854 ex. 18
fax: 410-889-5904

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