Hi

I’m having an issue with mail on my Debian server.

Many GBs are being used up on the /var partition so it runs low on diskspace, the majority is used up within the /var/spool/mqueue-client directory. I believe this is where messages are held while trying to send, and they remain there for 5 days before being removed. So all the time there is 5 days’ worth of emails.

I’ve read that the 5 days could be reduced so there would be fewer mails in the directory (which doesn’t solve the problem of why they’re not sending, but would help with space in the meantime), by editing the /etc/mail/sendmail.mc file with the line:

define(`confTO_QUEUERETURN',`3d')dnl

then typing,

make -C /etc/mail && /etc/init.d/sendmail reload

which would reduce the number of days to keep to 3 days, but this line is not in the file at the moment, to edit. Would it just need adding somewhere?

I have also checked the mail.log file from /var/log, which contains *many* lines similar to the following:

Jun 12 16:09:46 <*SERVERNAME*> sm-msp-queue[26960]: v5B8K1ob012425: to=postmaster, delay=1+06:23:22, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, pri=4282993, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=4.0.0, stat=Deferred: Connection refused by [127.0.0.1]


Any help is much appreciated

Thanks,
/G

You should add that line if it doesn't exist among the other "define ..." lines in sendmail,mc


Are you sure sendmail is running and listening on the local loopback interface (127.0.0.1)?