sendmail on hpux 11.11

[Shivkumar]

Dear Sirs;

We are using sendmail email server on HP-UX B.11.11.

I saw some email messages in the queues as below:-


root 1627 1 0 Sep 15 ? 0:18 sendmail: ./j8CEuYH10255: from queue
root 846 16726 0 11:27:03 ? 0:00 sendmail: ./j8FCLeD29813: from queue
root 21275 1 0 20:28:35 ? 0:13 sendmail: ./j8D3wjR05840: from queue
root 14902 1 0 Sep 15 ? 0:23 sendmail: ./j8CNS0104710: from queue
root 12023 16726 0 03:55:47 ? 0:06 sendmail: ./j8FAvvI05410: from queue
root 29473 1 0 Sep 15 ? 0:28 sendmail: ./j8C5x1k27605: from queue
root 24181 16726 0 10:26:53 ? 0:01 sendmail: ./j8E3weZ18319: from queue
root 14560 1 0 14:27:35 ? 0:13 sendmail: ./j8CMvt401609: from queue
root 4272 16726 0 11:57:08 ? 0:00 sendmail: ./j8DGumd00425: from queue
root 2626 16726 0 02:25:32 ? 0:07 sendmail: ./j8DAtmn20840: from queue
root 8915 16726 1 03:25:42 ? 0:06 sendmail: ./j8D8tSk08004: from queue
root@jasmine: /sbin/init.d # sendmail restart

I want to clear the messages.

Please suggest me some ways out.

Thanks,
Shiv

[Rick Garland · Accepted solution]

/var/spool/mqueue is where the mail messages are stored until they have a successful delivery. If you want to clean these up (and have no intention of keeping them) then you can delete the files in the /var/spool/mqueue directory.

Other area to check is /var/mail/
This is the area that stores mail that has been delivered to a user acct. In this example, check the /var/mail/root file.

[Shivkumar]

Rick; I want that email messages should go to the users. I don't want to delete them.

When i tried to restart sendmail; i got below error:

root@jasmine: /sbin/init.d # sendmail restart
restart... User unknown

The prompt was hanging there and the sendmail process is not getting restarted.

Please suggest.

Thanks,
Shiv

[Raj D.]

Hi Shiv,

Hope you have logged in as jasmine and then did su ,

or try $ su -

Try to restart sendmail from root,
what it says..

Cheers,
Raj.

[Shivkumar]

I tried it as root. Thanks.

[Joseph Loo]

hi shiv,

have u tried:

# killsm
# ps -ef|grep sendmail
check if sendmail daemon still exist, if no daemon, start sendmail:
# /sbin/init.d/sendmail start
# ps -ef|grep sendmail
check to confirm daemon now appears
# mailq
to check mail queue
# sendmail -v
to test

regards.

[Mel Burslan]

Shiv,

What does the output of command mailq say ?

I think you are trying to send them out of hpat98x, (remebered it from an old posting of yours) which I think is a server which sends subscribers some HP tech doc.s. As I worked with these servers, the main problem I have encountered and relayed to the system owner business units to establish a dead-wood email pruning method. I am not sure if you are on the same boat as well, but if you see a lot of

deferred transmission due to transient address error

or something similar to that, it basically means the address you are trying to send mail to is currently not accepting email messages for some reason. More than likely, the subscriber has left the post he/she subscibed this email list from is no longer there and either this email acct got deleted or it got so full that the mail server is not accepting anymore messages into it.

Or another scenario, there were so many documents to send to so many addresses, server is having hard time delivering these to the recipient servers. Indication of this is constantly changing PIDs on the list you gave on your original post. Or to the same effect, the mail spool file names are changing on the mailq command output.

See which one is your case. If it is the load problem, just wait over the weekend, it will subside tremendously by monday having majority of the messages delivered. This was my experience when I was in your shoes. If it is the first scenario, you need to contact the business unit and ask them if the target email addresses can be deleted from the subscriber list by the owner of that list.

Hope this helps