Postfix accepting mail, but not processing queue

[Jason Dixon]

On Jul 8, 2004, at 4:06 PM, Parker Morse wrote:

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> My secondary MX is a RH 9 box running Postfix.
>
> I had an incident with a runaway Perl script last night which jacked 
> load averages up towards 18 and 19 and gummed things up quite a bit. 
> (Among other things, it stopped accepting SSH connections.) I got it 
> cleaned up this morning, and it's accepting SSH again, but mail is 
> behaving oddly.
>
> It accepts SMTP connections and queues the mail. But it isn't 
> delivering the mail. The queue just gets longer and longer.
>
> It's almost entirely a disgusting amount of spam, so I've been 
> deleting the queue wholesale now and then just to keep things under 
> control (using `postsuper -d ALL') but it does usually send me its own 
> diagnostics, among other things, so I'd prefer to actually get the 
> valid mail.
>
> I have tried `postfix reload' and `postfix flush'; neither have 
> produced any errors to speak of, but they haven't solved the problem, 
> either.
>
> Where should I be looking to figure out what's failing? I don't appear 
> to have qshape on this machine.

Watch your /var/log/maillog to see where the delivery is failing.  If 
you're running SpamAssassin, Amavis, or one of the other content 
checkers, it's possible they've died and Postfix is unable to deliver 
them to the socket.

--
Jason Dixon, RHCE
DixonGroup Consulting
http://www.dixongroup.net