I'm a real newbie, so please be gentle with me.

This is kind of a dual question: I have an apache server running linux. There are autoresponders on 4 domains serving large mail lists, averaging about 50,000 to 60,000 email addresses.

There are a lot of "could not deliver mail for 4 hours, will keep trying until the message is 5 days old."

This causes the mqueue and maillog sizes to grow very large. The huge majority of the could not deliver for 4 hour bounces eventually are undeliverable.

I thought I could empty the mqueue with
# cd /var/spool/mqueue/
mqueue # find . | xargs -- rm -f

That returns a cannot remove '.' or '..' message.

What commands can I use to empty the mqueue and what command to empty the maillog?

Thanks, bigspot

wrt maillogs, you can tell log rotate to rotate the log when it gets to a certain size, or you can get the log to rotate daily.

see

for many examples

Thanks, I got the maillogs and mqueue cleaned. I think I interrupte a current mailing by emptying the mqueue in the middle of a mail send. I think that by waiting until their is no mailing underway to empty the mqueue will work.

Thanks again.