[Mailman-Users] How to kill the evil that is sendmail

[mailman at tux.org]

On Wed, 25 Sep 2002, Angel Gabriel wrote:

> What I would like to do, is to get rid of all the email that sendmail
> is STILL strying to send. You know when it tries to deliver mail for
> up to five days or whatever. I stopped short of uninstalling it, and
> re-installing it in case it picks up where it left off. I look in the
> mail queue, and I can't see any messages, but I look in the logs, and
> it's trying addresses every hour or so.  It's making me wonder if,
> mailman is the culprit. Because I can't see what mailman is about to
> do, I can only see the end results. It's not slowing down my machine,
> or anything like that, it's just plain ANNOYING. Any ideas anyone?

Don't forget that with Mailman and sendmail (and, likely, any MTA)
you are talking about -two- queues: Mailman's and the MTA's.  I have
never heard of sendmail attempting to send out messages that are not
in -its- queue.  Use 'mailq' to list sendmail's queue.  Or, the
direct approach is to look in /var/spool/mqueue (or whatever you
may have configured as sendmail's queue directory).  Also, no need
to reinstall sendmail: just clean out its queue (there are nice
ways to do so, and brutal ways, too; go ahead and use the brutal
way (rm -f /var/spool/mqueue/*), since I think it'll help provide
some stress relief, too :-)

(And besides, if you do reinstall sendmail without cleaning out its
queue, yes: it will just pick up from where it left off.)

If both Mailman's and sendmail's queues are empty and the machine
-still- retries sending old messages, you have a gremlin in the
box, and you need to throw it into a volcano.  (That should also
provide a certain amount of stress relief.)  Since real gremlins
are quite rare, if in fact both Mailman's and sendmail's queues are
empty and the machine is sending out messages every hour or so,
something -else- is sending -in- new messages every hour or so.

- Andrew

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