Sendmail Submission problem

David Mackintosh <David.Mackintosh@xxxxxxxxxx> · Tue, 3 Aug 2004 12:10:04 -0400

Greetings, list

I have a strange sendmail problem.  It seems that some messages are
submitted to the machine by client programs using some mechanism we
don't understand.  Messages submitted in this manner disappear until
such time that we reboot the server; then all such messages are
blasted out as sendmail is restarted.  As this is a production server
there can be quite a long period of time between reboots.

So far I've done the obvious:

 - there's nothing in the logfiles;
 - there is nothing in either mail queue (ie mailq and mailq -Ac both
   show an empty queue);
 - restarting sendmail isn't enough to trigger this flood;
 - test mails such as
    date | mail -s"Test" postmaster
    date | sendmail -v postmaster
  ...are delivered correctly.

If it helps, the most frequent problem application is Visible
System's Issues program.  However, not all emails from this program
get hidden in this manner.  The other one is 'mutt'; again, not all
emails get hidden in this manner.  Mutt is what makes me suspect the
submission mechanism -- I suspect Issues uses the same mechanism.

Please let me know if I can provide more information; any insights
(or wild guesses) cheerfully entertained.

Thanks!

-- 
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