Sendmail - savemail panic

[gomsi]

Hi All,

I am working on HPUX 11.31, I am getting Savemail panic msg in console in every 5 minutes.

Please help

[Dennis Handly]

Any more details in /var/adm/syslog/maillog?

[Matti_Kurkela]

Is your /var filesystem full? Run:

bdf /var

to see.

The "savemail panic" message usually means that Sendmail cannot process the message, but cannot even reject it.

Sendmail uses /var mainly for three things:

• the mail inboxes of the local users are stored in /var/mail
• the mail queue directory for emails Sendmail is processing is located in /var/spool/mqueue.
• the mail processing log is stored (through the syslog daemon) in /var/adm/syslog/mail.log.

If /var/mail contains large files (= a lot/very large emails in user's inbox), you might contact the owner of those files and ask them to archive their old email somewhere else.

If /var/spool/mqueue contains a lot of files, use the "mailq" command to examine the queue. You will see the From and To addresses of each email. If you see a lot of messages that are neither sent by your local users nor sent to your local users, your system may be accessible to spammers as an open relay. This is bad, because it means your server will be blacklisted by other mail server administrators, causing even legitimate outgoing mail from your system to be rejected by the recipients' spam filters. If you don't fix it, eventually your entire domain may be blacklisted. If your system has its SMTP port accessible from the Internet, you should configure it to be resistant to spam.

If the mail logfile has grown very large, you might want to gzip and truncate it:

# gzip -9 < /var/adm/syslog/mail.log > /somewhere/else/mail.log.gz
# > /var/adm/syslog/mail.log

If your system is intended to be a mail server, you should probably create a separate volume group for email data, with one LV mounted as /var/mail and another as /var/spool/mqueue. That way you can expand it as big as you need, while still keeping the size of vg00 relatively small (so that backing up the basic OS with Ignite-UX remains feasible).