Reprocessing sendmail failed messages

Kris Anderson ciscoaix at yahoo.com
Fri Mar 31 22:51:59 UTC 2006



--- Tim Traver <tt-list at simplenet.com> wrote:

> Kris,
> 
> thanks for your attempts, but I'm not sure you
> understand what I mean...
I understand, you have a lot of files in clientmque
and you want to send them out. Thus the submission of
what I found in google.
> I cannot run a queue manually on these messages
> because sendmail thinks 
> they are permanent errors. So any queue runs on
> these messages produce 
> nothing.
Check your maillog by the way and see what it says
about the messages.
Found something else (It talks about requeuing things
and offers a script)-
http://www.patoche.org/LTT/daemon/00000073.html
> On this box we don't run a sendmail daemon. We only
> relay mail to 
> another server when the sendmail daemon gets called.
> That is why those 
> messages are in the clientmqueue dir instead of the
> regular mqueue dir.
> 
> My real issue is that I now have these bunch of
> messages that won't get 
> processed, because sendmail assumes they are
> permanent failures.
> 
> The q files are named with a capital Q in front of
> them, is this why 
> they are ignored ?
I happen to have a stuck message. So I'll see if I can
get the bugger sent off. Okay, I renamed the little
beast from Qf to qf and sendmail whined about it being
invalid or something. So I poked around in the mqueue
directory. In it I found two files:
dfk2VKp7im043605 (This is the body of the email)
qfk2VKp7im043605 (This is the sender stuff)

Unless you have the associated df file then it's lost.
But to veryify look inside a Qf file and see what
turns up. If you don't see the body of a message then
it looks like it is lost.

> Is there any one who knows how to revert and
> re-submit these messages ???

YAY! I did it!
backup your files first!
I took the above files, hopeing that the df & Qf pair
were there, in this case they were. If not already
shut down, turn off the queue from /etc/mail with a
make stop-mspq
Did I mention that it's a good idea at this point to
backup your queue? Back it up.
Rename all the Qf files to qf (or to test, just a df
qf pair)
ensure that group permissions are rw  (I don't know if
it is important but my guess it is because they are
going to have be erased by the queuer)
Start the queue back up with make start-mspq

Something you might want to try (again back your stuff
up and I didn't try this by the way)
rename all the files, move them to the mqueue
directory, chown them to
<whatEverUserAlreadyOwningThem>:daemon (they are
probably :smmsp Or something like that, but basicaly
make the group match the same group of a given
directory).

then try and tickle sendmail to sending the items off.
Probably sendmail -bp might kick it.

Anyway, hope something there helps. BTW, I looked
through sendmail source at queue.c and there's a flag
called bogus and if it's not true then sendmail stucks
an ugly message in your maillog about uid/gid not
matching. I think that has to do with the particular
group owner of a given queue directory and if things
aren't kosher then BAM! you get the ugly message. I
know I did.


Good luck.
~Mr. Anderson

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