some mails stored in mail queue

[hangyu]

I found some mail is stored in /var/spool/mqueue , and I run "mailq" found some mails , I try to restart sendmail daemon , but the mail is still not send out , can advise how to send it ou ? thx

[Rob Leadbeater]

Hi,

There's probably some reason why the mails couldn't be sent...

Have a look in the log files to figure out what's wrong. Probably in /var/log/mail

Hope this helps,

Regards,

Rob

[Matti_Kurkela]

Normally sendmail will periodically go through the queue and try to re-send any mails remaining there. If the mails are more than 6-8 hours old, sendmail will send a warning message to the sender of the original email, reporting that the mail has not reached the recipient yet, but sendmail will keep trying.

After the message has remained in the queue for a longer time (with the usual settings, about a week or two) sendmail will give up trying and notify the sender about the failure in mail delivery.

The command "sendmail -q" makes sendmail go through all the mails in the queue and make an immediate attempt to send them all.

If the receiving servers cannot be reached or they are not accepting connections, the mail will remain in the queue.

If your network connections are working correctly, the problem may be at the recipient end. Unless you can reach the administrators of the receiving site (obviously not by email, but using a phone or other methods instead), there is nothing you can do about it.

Look at the listing produced by "mailq": do the messages seem legitimate, or do they look like junk email messages? If they're junk email, someone has been trying to use your server as a junk mail relay and has had least partial success: this is bad, because it may cause your server to be denied as a junk mail source.

If you run sendmail in a machine that is exposed to the Internet, you should always keep sendmail up to date and ensure you have some anti-spam rules defined. The junk mail senders are *always* trying to find machines with old versions of sendmail and/or inadequate relay protection.

MK