Local queue gets huge

[ASCIIGirl]

Hi All!
I'm having a quite serious problem with Qmail and it's Local Queue, it gets full of messages.

Right now I have 18000 messages waiting to be processed. The control/concurrencylocal is on 50 (was on 200) but process the local queue one by one..or at most 3 at the same time.
Nov 12 17:26:36 server qmail: 1194899196.299299 status: local 3/50 remote 90/1000

Any idea how can I make this go faster?? tried with killall -ALRM qmail-send but didn't worked

Thanks a lot for your help!
ASCIIGirl

 

[Hedgren]

18000 messages is definately not good. You might be actually 'working' for spammers with all this speed-ups...
So, first of all, please try to find out what are those messages flooding you queue.
To do that, you could open Plesk Control Panel -> Server -> Mail -> Mail queue and choose to show only local queue.

If the queue is flooded by bounces, check this one: http://kb.swsoft.com/en/1376 : "It is recommended not to send bounce but reject mail for inexistent users, it can be set for every domain at the Domain->Mail->Preferences page in Plesk CP. To change this for multiply domains use. group operations feature".

If the entire problem is an outgoing and incoming spam, digest the article about the spam problem: http://kb.swsoft.com/en/766 . Try to find out the spam sources and stop them.

Of course, you may simply try:
/etc/init.d/qmail stop
/etc/init.d/xinetd stop
/etc/init.d/qmail start
/etc/init.d/xinetd start
/etc/init.d/psa-spamassassin restart
as well as 2 more articles:
http://kb.swsoft.com/en/1414
http://kb.swsoft.com/en/1370
and see if it helps you by magic...

 

[unika]

Of course, you need to rebuild the queue as described here:
http://kb.swsoft.com/en/766

And some more good advises

To protect the server, for example, you can remove 127.0.0.1 address from white list and remove /usr/sbin/sendmail so that
users have to send messages to remote addresses only by smtp and only with authorization and force your clients to customize
their scripts to use SMTP authorization, but it will affect a lot of free applications (which usually send messages through
system sendmail), for example it won't be possible to send messages to remote addresses through webmail.


Try to use MAPS zones, spamassassin, blacklists, rejecting emails for non-existing users, update Plesk and configure SPF technology, etc.