Mailing List Archive: Problems with deferred messages

Heyla,
one problem I've encountered with qmail (0.96) is:
The is a message in the queue which has been deferred, the remote site is up
(and there is only one MX record for it) and I can do a manual smtp session
with it, however when I send a SIGALRM to the qmail-send program, it doesn't
always send the message and it gets deferred again.

This can also happen when there are many messages in the queue. Some will be
sent and some won't even when they could be. If I want to flush the queue
I have to kill qmail-send and restart it. This never seems to happen for some
hosts, eg. my home machine always works (there are three MX records for it -
one of which is the machine the mail is queued on)

Does anyone know what's happening? Has it been fixed?
Is there any way I can get more information on why it's failing?
Thanks.
--
Geoff Wing [mason@primenet.com.au] Technical Manager
Phone : +61-3-9818 2977 PrimeNet - Internet Consultancy
Facsimile: +61-3-9819 3788 Web : <URL:http://www.primenet.com.au/>
Mobile : 0412 162 441

Jos Backus wrote:
:Hm, I have been seeing the same thing at times. Sending an alarm signal
:doesn't work but rerunning qmail invariably does. Maybe the remote site's
:listen() queue gets overflowed and connections get reset as a result? (But
:that would preclude the rerun from working as well, I guess). Do some mails at
:least get through? In my case they would all stay in the queue.

I don't have it happen often. I suspect it won't have anything to do with
the remote site/s, and I can't remember if any deferred messages got sent if
qmail when into that state. Probably not. When I've noticed it happening
they've just been queueing for one or two sites. I suspect some internal
checking is not done correctly and old information is used, ie. information
like that given by qmail-tcpto is not ignored when SIGALRM is sent to
qmail-send
--
Geoff Wing [mason@primenet.com.au] Technical Manager
Phone : +61-3-9818 2977 PrimeNet - Internet Consultancy
Facsimile: +61-3-9819 3788 Web : <URL:http://www.primenet.com.au/>
Mobile : 0412 162 441