dead.letter problem -- Can I call sendmail to process again?

[Debbie Fleith]

We had a problem with our aliases and by the time we discovered it, we now have over 2000 messages in /root/dead.letter. All mail in this dead.letter file is to different recipients. Our alias file is now correct. How can I get sendmail to process this file and populate all the correct mail boxes from the text within this dead.letter file? It is text only, no attachments.

[Bryan Eley]

Debbie,

Have you tried the 'formail' filter/command?

Perhaps something like
formail -ds dead.letter > newmail
cat newmail |formail -s sh -c 'cat >msg.$FILENO'

I think this should split up the contents into single files that can be placed back into the sendmail queue, and if you restart sendmail the messages should (theoretically) be reprocessed and sent.

Admittedly I've not played around too much with this but maybe this might provide you with something you could use.

Bryan

[Bryan Eley]

I'd also recommend backing that original dead.letter file up...just in case this command doesn't solve your problem.

Bryan

[Alan_152]

There is a detailed process on how to do excatly this situation in Chapter 21 of Nemeth et al's "Unix System Administration Handbook."

I'd type it in for you, but the section is long and detailed, and I'm not familiar enough with sendmail to know which parts are the most relevant.