sendmail: clientmqueue directory storing massive messages, not being cleared

[Doug White]

On Thu, 5 Jun 2003, Chris Byrnes wrote:

> Can you please explain the difference between /var/spool/clientmqueue and
> /var/spool/mqueue and why one seems to be taken care of regularly, but the
> other had 42,000 unsent messages?  When I start sendmail, I've always just
> run "/usr/sbin/sendmail -bd -q60m -h10 -R full".  Do I need to do something
> differently?

This allows the local system to send mail normally (i.e., store mail for
retry in cases where it could not be immediately sent) but yet not run a
persistent listening sendmail daemon. This was added in the sendmail 8.12
range and has been active on FreeBSD since the early 4.X days.  Even if
you had

sendmail_enable="NO"

in rc.conf, the clientmqueue scanner should have started up. You had to
make it

sendmail_enable="NONE"

to completely shut it off.

-- 
Doug White                    |  FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
dwhite at gumbysoft.com          |  www.FreeBSD.org