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Qmail keeps failing

W

wsani

Guest
Our monitoring services keeps telling us that qmail smtp has failed, then it comes back the next minute. I show the server load is pretty high (5) right now. Any suggestions?
 
If by monitoring services you mean the page in Server > Services Management, yes, it will incorrectly show qmail as stopped if the load is too high.

You should try to sort why the load is too high before anything. If it really a big queue, with lots of spam, you really should consider using one of the 'extra' anti-spam tools described around in this forum.

How high is your load btw? Can you check what process are eating up the server?
 
I meant monitoring servie using Pingdom.com looking at the SMTP port every 1 minute. While aggressive, it allows me to keep on top of issues quicker.

I'm using qmail-scanner from atomic and the load average: 5.52, 5.66, 5.54

Dual Xeon 2.8Ghz with 6GB RAM. I have around 300 domains on this server.
 
As much as I hated Exim, right now it looks pretty damn good...
 
To add more to the issue, it seems the I/O is just off the hook. There is also a 20-30 second lag on the SMTP connection. I have a 10Mbps connection with a 50% consumption at peak, so I know this isn't network related. Basically QMAIL is just performing really poorly withot any explanation.
 
Mail server issue

Hi, It sounds like we are seeing decrease in mail service performance after the 8.6 upgrade.

I have 3 servers now running 8.6, two seem fine after the upgrade. The one however, is performing very poorly now in regards to mail as noted by the Mail Queue. It seems that the server needs to be restarted are times, but still is not keeping up. I feel that it is related to the 8.6 upgrade since it started doing this after the upgrade. I had not made any other changes.

What should one look at in this situation to get a better idea of what is happening.

I do use spamassassin on all 3 servers.

Since I am asking questions.
How about one more related to Mail Queue.

Does any one know how to search for a string of words in the Mail Queue to delete junk mail.
Rather then search for one word at a time, like "watches", can one do a search like "watches OR free OR male"
I would love to put together a list of words that I could search for and then click delete.

Thanks for any help!
Brad
 
I vaugely recall qmail-remove doing something like that. Though that's nothing qmail offers out of the box.
 
To add more to the issue, it seems the I/O is just off the hook. There is also a 20-30 second lag on the SMTP connection. I have a 10Mbps connection with a 50% consumption at peak, so I know this isn't network related. Basically QMAIL is just performing really poorly withot any explanation.

How much of those mails in your queue are spam? Making spamassassin go thru all that junk can turn it into a serverassassin pretty quick.

My suggesttion for you, if you are not doing so already: get an anti-spam tool which works at smtp-level, spamdyke for example. That not only will take off a lot of load from your server, but will also reduce the spam which spamassassin can't detect.

That if your problem is actually spam, which is what im making my bet. I could be totally wrong tho.

My load before start usign spamdyke was around 10 in peak times, (a dual E5345 with 4GB ram), now it doesnt go above 2.
 
Yeah spamassassin is probably the source of my demise. Qmail-scanner uses it, so I'm going to remove it from the server.
 
I noticed that my server was being attacked over and over again, so I just installed qgreylist. Seems to work so far. I'll update as I learn more...

PS. Dictionary attack.
PSS. I'm now using http://www.easyantispam.com/
 
The problem of using graylist is that you end up causing a delay in the messages to be received. That can cause some stress with customers who need messages to be delivered asap.

Because of that, and because it was also causing problem for my tech support who don't have access to server logs and couldn't quickly diagnose problems with e-mails because of the delay of test messages, we decided not to use it.

But it all comes down to your company's internal policy, and the target market you serve. The tool in itself is good enough, you just need to balance where it is the right one for you or not.

As for a external filtering provided by a third company, yes, theres always not enough logs to make you totally confident ;)
 
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