Mail Queue Question

[mkabwilliams]

I'm a new plesk users and very novice to linux and qmail. I have a website that has a newsletter with about 14,000 users signed up with it. My website uses Joomla and I have a component installed into that that is a newsletter component. When it sends out the mailing to my 14,000 users and I go into the plesk panel and look at the Mail Queue It seems to stay high for a few days. I'm not sure what the normal should look like or how fast it should send mail. Could someone give me some advice on this? I know that my newsletter list of 14,000 members has a lot of bad emails that are bouncing in it as I took over the list from someone and its about 4 years old. I'm trying to find a way to clean up all the bad addresses right now so I'm sure that will help once its clean.


Thanks

 

[stupidnic]

You will probably want to raise your concurrency limits in qmail.

I think the default for outgoing is either 10 or 20. You might want to try 40 at least.

To change this number you need to login to the server via SSH and create/edit the file

/var/qmail/control/concurrencyremote

and put:

40

in that file and save it. Then restart qmail (/etc/init.d/qmail restart) and your mail should go out about twice as fast. There can be other modifications that you make to the system that will help things along as well such as doublebounceto, and also setting up the aliases to handle bounce replies.

Good luck.

 

[mkabwilliams]

I've looked in that location and don't see a file/folder called concurrencyremote could i be looking in the wrong spot?

 

[stupidnic]

That's why I wrote "create/edit" in my reply. The file isn't there by default so you must create it if it isn't. Sorry if that was ambigious in my inital reply.

 

[mkabwilliams]

oh ok sorry didn't catch that part.

 

[sbillis]

This is also quite normal if you have lots of bad addresses.... The mail will stay in the queue until it times out. I don't remember qmail's default timeouts but they are fairly long. Qmail will attempt to send a message and if it fails will attempt again in a short while. If it fails again it then doubles the last time to wait and attempts to send the mail again. Again if it fails it doubles the new "last time to wait" so on and so on until the time in the queue exceeds the timeout for failed messages at which time it will delete the message.

FYI, increasing the concurrencyremote from the default will allow more connections out of your server at any one time, but the effect of this is to increase loading on the server and also increase peak bandwidth useage at the time, but if you can afford the increased bandwidth and loading then this is not a bad thing to do

 

[mkabwilliams]

How would I go about changing the time out to a shorter time? I know I have a lot of bad email addresses from my list and I'm trying to clean them out but it takes such a long time.

 

[sbillis]

All commands are from the qmail installation directory usually /var/qmail


The default queuelifetime is one week:

# bin/qmail-showctl | grep queuelifetime
queuelifetime: (Default.) Message lifetime in the queue is 604800 seconds.

I'm guessing this is longer than your users would like.

To bounce undeliverable messages more promptly, so senders will be alerted sooner about any delivery delays, set /var/qmail/control/queuelifetime with a value equal to a day or so:

# echo "82800" > control/queuelifetime
# bin/qmail-showctl | grep queuelifetime
queuelifetime: Message lifetime in the queue is 82800 seconds.

Now the message will bounce if not delivered within 23 hours.