sendmail mailstats command.

[someone_4]

Just wondering does anyone know how accurate the mailstats command for sendmail? Are there any other sendmail admin commands or tweaks out there?

Statistics from Fri Dec 7 12:53:09 2001
M msgsfr bytes_from msgsto bytes_to Mailer
3 12630 1665726K 49655 1676605K local
5 64323 1632387K 17547 1870093K esmtp
========================================
T 76953 3298113K 67202 3546698K

[Christopher Caldwell]

The stats are built in - in my experience they're oh highly reliable. What problems are you seeing?

[Christopher Caldwell]

I do know of some utilities to you can use to enhance the granularity of mailstats. Basically mailstats accumulates statistics from the dawn of time, which might not be convenient if you want to plot daily/monthly/yearly volume with mins/maxs etc.

These utilities take a snap shot of mailstats and allow you to use mrtg or perhaps NNM to plot and track the stats.

You can emulate the utilities with simple parsing routines designed to tear apart the mailstats file.

[someone_4]

well this is a weird issue. For some reason or another our mailserver is getting emails say from msn.com. But after a few hours msn.com gets back a notice saying that the email has not been sent for 4 hours and that msn will keep trying to send it. Well after a while our customer on our mail server gets the email from the sender over and over and over again. The same email with the same email id. This is with differnt users and differnt domains. I have actully called the ISP of one sender and they said that actully saw the email stuck on their server and that for somereason was not getting a connection to our server. Very weird. The only thing I see that is consistant isin the mail.

host map: lookup (brightstarmail.com): deferred

where startmail.com is allot of differnt domains.
wich leads me to believe to be some kind of sendmail config or dns issue.

[Christopher Caldwell]

Things are kept in the mail.log in fairly painstaking detail. You can grep for MAILID in mail.log to see if sendmail ever saw the transaction. You might also check for the transmitting MX, the To: address, or the From: address, all available from mail.log.

It might also be nice to see what sendmail -v on the distant server says when you try to sendmail interactively (if you can't find something interesting in mail.log).

[someone_4]

It works with the sendmail -v option. And if we get the sender that is having the problem to send us another email to our test account on the same server. We cant duplicate the problem. It is almost like there is a limit somewhere in the sendmail.cf file that is set low. And that a limit is reached and then it starts to send back or not process the emails past that limit. But I have been lookin and reading and I cant find such a setting.

[Christopher Caldwell]

Hmmm. Sounds like a DNS issue.

Run sendmail -d0.1 -d0.4 you < /dev/null

This should show your sendmail version, your name, and aliases.

Make sure DNS (forward and back) is correct for each name/alias.

In addition, if you're running modern sendmail, you may be configured to look up from addresses on the fly - if you are DNS has to work, or you'll get a temporary failure.

Finally, multiple copies of e-mail is usually a delivery agent problem - your agent said it didn't successfully deliver the e-mail (4XX series error) even though the mail was successfully delivered. This problem was prevelant on older HP/sendmail combinations. I'd imagine that you could see a similar problem if you replaced rmail as the LDA, if you've got quotas, or if you've got virus scanning going and the LDA isn't returning the correct error code.

[someone_4]

ok here we go. Dns is working fine. But looking and monitoring the mailq and mail.log I see one thing where false domains are getting stuck in the mailq. Dns can resolve domains just fine. But here we have false domains trying to come in. Is there a setting some where I can control this?


OAA28703 29537 Tue Dec 11 14:34 <>
(Deferred: Name server: i,y: host name lookup failure)

OAA28921 29598 Tue Dec 11 14:35 <>
(Deferred: Name server: ????: host name lookup failure)

OAA27460 29612 Tue Dec 11 14:30 <>
(Deferred: Name server: k3yl=????,-mdh????: host name lookup)

OAA28867 29612 Tue Dec 11 14:35 <>
(Deferred: Name server: q.: host name lookup failure)

[Christopher Caldwell]

Are the characters in the mailq really garbled as in your message - some of the characters aren't legal from a DNS standpoint - the names should get shot down by vrfy.