[H-GEN] Sendmail temp files?

[Robert Brockway]

On Sat, 28 Feb 2004, Tony Melia wrote:

> Hi all - I just noticed my root partition disk space has gone down in 2G
> chunks over the past few days.  I found the offender is a directory
> called /var/spool/clientmqueue, but after googling I can't find out if
> these are simply temp files, or if it is a problem.  Looking at them,
> they seem to be fragments of mails.  I did have a problem a while ago
> where a cron job was producing output in the region of 50M-100M which
> was mailed to me, could this be a similar problem and sendmail stops
> spooling the mail from cron after recieveing a 2G mail to send?
>
>Any ideas what these are or where they came from?

Hi Tony.  Recent versions of sendmail implement MSP (Mail Submission
Protocol).  The idea is to seperate out email arriving from an MUA (Mail
User Agent - eg pine) from mail arriving from another MTA (Mail Transport
Agent - eg sendmail or postfix).

Anyway, MSP causes sendmail to listen on 587/tcp for connects from MUAs.
Email arriving via this path will end up in clientmqueue (or mqueue-client
on Debian and possibly others).  This is a seperate queue and can be
treated differently by sendmail if needed.

See if you have 587/tcp open.  Mail coming in via MSP should be subject to
the same routing/forwarding rules that mail coming in from another path
should be subject too in general.

So those files are actually emails.  Sendmail normally generates 2 files
for each email, regardless of the queue.  You might like to research while
those emails are stuck in the queue if that is indeed the case.

HTH.

Rob

-- 
Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert at timetraveller.org, zzbrock at uqconnect.net
Linux counter project ID #16440 (http://counter.li.org)
"The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens" -Baha'u'llah