Can I decode the file of starting 'd' character in /var/spool/mqueue ?

[Lee Tae-kyung]

Hello,

Who does anyone know this subject?

Thanks in advance.

[Steven E. Protter]

/var/spool/mqueue is mail queed to go off of your machine into the wilderness(network).

If you have files piling up there, the best idea is to let the sendmail daemon try and process them out.

mailq
# am i right, is there mail trying to get off the box

sendmail -v -q

This will process the queue interactively and provide error messaging as to why th email is not getting off the box.

The standard sendmail configuration will bounce the mail back to the user after 5 days of not being able to deliver it.

Common problems with the mailqueue piling up mail include network connectivity and DNS resolution issues, based on the following configuration files:

/etc/nsswitch.conf # correctly configured?
/etc/resolv.conf # can you ping, communicate with those servers.
/etc/hosts # if you are not using DNS.

If you have having DNS trouble, this can be the cause of files piling up.

Also note that if sendmail is set up to relay mail and the relay server defined in the DS directory in sendmail.cf isn't accepting mail this is an issue.

As far as decoding goes, there is little to decode unless the mail has been encrypted in advance. These are ascii files with some encoding text to allow the mail to be processed. You can see and interpret the content of these files with the cat command.

I reccommend figuring out why the files are there and not paying a lot of attention to the content of these files. The only exception is if you suspect spam is being pushed through your configuration.

SEP

[Sridhar Bhaskarla · Accepted solution]

Hi,

dfXXXX file is generally the data/body of the mail with the control file as qfXXXX. You may also find some xf* files and they are created during the session. XXXX is the message identifier that you can see it logged in mail.log file.

-Sri