[afnog] Help!! Mails stuck in the hold queue

Tue Nov 9 10:33:14 UTC 2010

I have attached the content of MailScanner.conf.
Does this Max Children = 5 define the max number of MailScanner child processes? Even with this setting, Mailwatch lists the number of children processes as 10.
My hardware configuration is HP
ProLiant DL585 G5 (4 x QuadCore CPU 2.7GHz AMD Opteron and 32GB RAM). It should be able to process emails fast. 
This server has been working fine till sunday morning, no config changes were made. Could this have been caused by an update?

Thanks

Subject: Re: [afnog] Help!! Mails stuck in the hold queue
From: ksemat at psg.com
Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2010 11:53:20 +0300
CC: afnog at afnog.org
To: sesblue at hotmail.com

The contents of mailscanner.cong would be more useful here. However I would suggest that you create more MailScanner child processes. I remember there is a configuration option for that. 
Noah.
On Nov 9, 2010, at 11:37 AM, Ses Blue wrote:Thanks Noah,
I've checked the permission of different files and directory within /var/spool/postfix and they are all owned by postfix user with rwx privileges.
However after temporarily stopping using the server as for relay, it started processing the mails in the hold queue, 30 messages per scan as it's set in mailscanner.conf (Max Unscanned Messages Per Scan = 30) which is painfully slow considering there is more than 300 thousands messages in the queue.

I was wondering how i can optimize my server to perform more scans at a time (may be creating more MailScanner Child processes), increase the number of messages per scan...

Here is the output of Mailscanner -v

[root at mail-server ~]# MailScanner -v
Running on
Linux mail-server.online.com 2.6.18-194.17.1.el5 #1 SMP Wed Sep 29 12:50:31 EDT 2010 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
This is CentOS release 5.5 (Final)
This is Perl version 5.008008 (5.8.8)

This is MailScanner version 4.81.4
Module versions are:
1.00    AnyDBM_File
1.30    Archive::Zip
0.23    bignum
1.04    Carp
1.41    Compress::Zlib
1.119   Convert::BinHex
0.17    Convert::TNEF
2.121_08        Data::Dumper
2.27    Date::Parse
1.00    DirHandle
1.05    Fcntl
2.74    File::Basename
2.09    File::Copy
2.01    FileHandle
1.08    File::Path
0.20    File::Temp
0.90    Filesys::Df
3.64    HTML::Entities
3.64    HTML::Parser
3.57    HTML::TokeParser
1.23    IO
1.14    IO::File
1.13    IO::Pipe
2.04    Mail::Header
1.89    Math::BigInt
0.22    Math::BigRat
3.07    MIME::Base64
5.427   MIME::Decoder
5.427   MIME::Decoder::UU
5.427   MIME::Head
5.427   MIME::Parser
3.07    MIME::QuotedPrint
5.427   MIME::Tools
0.13    Net::CIDR
1.25    Net::IP
0.16    OLE::Storage_Lite
1.04    Pod::Escapes
3.05    Pod::Simple
1.09    POSIX
1.21    Scalar::Util
1.78    Socket
2.16    Storable
1.4     Sys::Hostname::Long
0.27    Sys::Syslog
1.26    Test::Pod
0.86    Test::Simple
1.9717  Time::HiRes
1.02    Time::localtime

Optional module versions are:
1.68    Archive::Tar
0.23    bignum
missing Business::ISBN
missing Business::ISBN::Data
missing Data::Dump
1.814   DB_File
1.25    DBD::SQLite
1.613   DBI
1.14    Digest
1.01    Digest::HMAC
2.36    Digest::MD5
2.11    Digest::SHA1
1.01    Encode::Detect
missing Error
0.2703  ExtUtils::CBuilder
2.2206  ExtUtils::ParseXS
2.38    Getopt::Long
missing Inline
missing IO::String
1.10    IO::Zlib
2.27    IP::Country
missing Mail::ClamAV
3.003001        Mail::SpamAssassin
missing Mail::SPF
missing Mail::SPF::Query
0.3607  Module::Build
missing Net::CIDR::Lite
0.66    Net::DNS
missing Net::DNS::Resolver::Programmable
missing Net::LDAP
 4.033  NetAddr::IP
missing Parse::RecDescent
missing SAVI
2.64    Test::Harness
missing Test::Manifest
1.95    Text::Balanced
1.35    URI
0.77    version
missing YAML

Thanks
Christian

Subject: Re: [afnog] Help!! Mails stuck in the hold queue
From: ksemat at psg.com
Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2010 11:10:12 +0300
CC: afnog at afnog.org
To: sesblue at hotmail.com

On Nov 8, 2010, at 5:48 PM, Ses Blue wrote:Hello,
I have a mail server running on centos 5.5 with postfix, mailscanner, spamassassin and clamav.
This server is mostly used for relay and since yesterday morning, I have most of the emails being stuck in the hold queue (/var/spool/postfix/hold/). I don't know what caused this, no changes in config were done, unless it was caused by an update.

If I remember my mailscanner setup well, one of the things involved in the setup is to modify the postfix main.cf so that it uses header checks to put all mail that comes into the hold queue by default so that mailscanner can then process it and pass them on after scanning.
So since the mail is going into the hold queue, then we can safely assume that the postfix part of all of this is working fine. So you need to check the mailscanner part of the setup.
Please check the various things specified on http://www.mailscanner.info/postfix.html especially having the correct directories specified, correct ownership permissions, and the right user in the mailscanner config.
Noah.

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