defining maximum number of delivery attempts

[starlite79]

Hi everyone.


I'm wondering if there is a way to define in the sendmail.mc or sendmail.cf the maximum # of delivery attempts? While testing some mailing scripts using mutt as the MUA and sendmail as the MTA, a partition became full because sendmail kept trying to deliver mail to bogus e-mail addresses. This is on a Red Hat EL5 mail server.

I apologize if this question has been answered, but I did not get an answer from the searches I did beforehand. Does the mail queue settings need to be defined in a script or command line? I would appreciate an example if this is the case.

 

[starlite79]

Hello again.

I have a better understanding of what happened. Bounce backs from bogus email addresses first went into /var/spool/mqueue. After a time they went into /var/spool/clientmqueue. Sendmail would continue to try to deliver to bogus email addresses, and consequently the clientmqueue became filled up.

I looked at my sendmail.cf and found the following UNCOMMENTED on timeout:

O Timeout.connect=1m
O Timeout.ident=0
O Timeout.queuereturn=5d
O Timeout.queuewarn=4h

Will changing any of those settings or others alleviate this problem?

Is accessing the queue and how often done at start or restart time? such as service sendmail -q1h restart?

When I type "ps -ef | grep sendmail" I see this:

ps -ef | grep sendmail
root 2814 1 0 Jun02 ? 00:00:00 sendmail: accepting connections
smmsp 2823 1 0 Jun02 ? 00:00:00 sendmail: Queue runner@01:00:00 for /var/spool/clientmqueue
smmsp 13107 12623 0 13:15 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/sendmail -FCronDaemon -i -odi -oem -oi -t
root 13406 13222 0 14:51 pts/2 00:00:00 grep sendmail

Right now those huge df files are manually removed from /var/spool/clientmqueue. Can anyone offer a better way (either inside configuration settings or at restart of sendmail)?