all about sendmail [12/05/2006 23:11:05]

Im sitting here watching sendmail process a mail queue on one of my machines. There's 846 messages in the queue. It's on number 5, and it's taken about 10 minutes so far for just this one message: it's just sitting there waiting to connect to a server that's very obviously not answering. Every couple minutes or so it tries another mail server for the same domain.

I don't know why it doesn't use an asynchronous socket scheme, so it can process other messages while waiting on this one. I guess what it does instead is lock the message-specific file in the queue and then a few minutes later another process comes along and just leapfrogs over it. Clunky, but it works most of the time.

This queue on this machine keeps clogging up with junk mail though. I've been going through every once in a while and clearing out the really old failures (just about all spam) by hand, but that was getting to be a pain. So I moved everything to a temporary mail queue so new mail could get through, and set to work on a little script to cope with the piles of mail. Now I can query mail to or from a particular address (or domain) and quarantine it in a separate queue directory, delete it entirely, or just print the list.

It's kind of neat. This has been on my wishlist for ages. :)