contents of file qf04F1Njkg002800 in /var/spool/mqueue

[NDO]

Hi

I have this file and a lot more like this in /var/spool/mqueue. The file contains the following:

#more qf04F1Njkg002800
V8
T1589507105
K1589540323
N20
P1761424
I64/8/79526
Malias database unavailable
Frs
$_localhost
$r
$slocalhost
${daemon_flags}c u
SMAILER-DAEMON
Malias database unavailable
Cpostmaster:1:0:postmaster
rRFC822; postmaster@mcelVMhost3.headquarter.tmm
RPFA:root
H?P?Return-Path: <M-^Ag>
H??Received: from localhost (localhost)
        by mcelVMhost3.headquarter.tmm (@(#)Sendmail version 8.13.3 - Revision 1.004:: HP-UX11.31 - 03rd February,2010/8.13.3) id 04F1Njkg002800;
        Fri, 15 May 2020 03:45:05 +0200 (SAST)
H?D?Date: Fri, 15 May 2020 03:45:05 +0200 (SAST)
H?F?From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <MAILER-DAEMON>
H?x?Full-Name: Mail Delivery Subsystem
H?M?Message-Id: <202005150145.04F1Njkg002800@mcelVMhost3.headquarter.tmm>
H??To: postmaster
H??MIME-Version: 1.0
H??Content-Type: multipart/report; report-type=delivery-status;
        boundary="04F1Njkg002800.1589507105/mcelVMhost3.headquarter.tmm"
H??Subject: Postmaster notify: see transcript for details
H??Auto-Submitted: auto-generated (postmaster-notification)
.

I would like to understand the meaning of the top lines, perhaps I might know why these files are filling up that directory

[Patrick Wallek]

These are e-mails that were not able to be sent.  The easier way to see queued e-mails and the reason they havent been sent or failed to send is via the 'mailq' command.

# mailq

[NDO]

the output of the mailq command, does not shed light to me.... sorry:

 #mailq | tail
04AGaGn7026252    43297 Sun May 10 18:57 MAILER-DAEMON
                 (alias database unavailable)
                                         root
04AGaGn5026252    43297 Sun May 10 18:57 MAILER-DAEMON
                 (alias database unavailable)
                                         root
04AGaGn6026252    43297 Sun May 10 18:57 MAILER-DAEMON
                 (alias database unavailable)
                                         root
                Total requests: 59917

[Patrick Wallek]

It actually may.

Do you have any mail aliases defined in the /etc/mail/aliases file?  If you do, is there a corresponding /etc/mail/aliases.db file?

If you don't have the aliases.db file, run the command 'newaliases' to create.

The try running the 'sendmail -q' command to see if anything changes.

[NDO]

I did some search on this forum, and found a solution, but what I would like to know is really how to interpret these qf ad df files.

The solution was this script that clear some files:

#!/bin/sh
mailq | awk 'substr($0,1,1) !~ "[\t -]" { print $1 }' | while read i; do
rm /var/spool/mqueue/?f$i
done