emails seem to take forever to arrive 1

[slylos]

I installed qmail-scanner/clamav/spamassassin last night and tried sending email to it using my yahoo account. I sent 1 and it arrived ok. I sent 2 more around 1:00 am and they didn't arrive until this morning. So tonight I was working on it again and the same thing happens: I send 1 and it arrives fine, then send another a few minutes later and I get nothing; I sent the last one about 1.5hrs ago. /var/log/qmail/current and /var/log/smtpd/current doesn't show anything except for the one message that arrived. I was looking for some kind of error message but nothing appears to even suggest that qmail recieved an email from anyone. Any help anyone can give me would be greatly appreciated - I convinced my boss that we should go with qmail over MS Exchange and now I'm not so sure I made the right decision given my experience level with qmail.

 

[Aziraphel]

First, this problem can be due to either qmail, either Yahoo (which maybe waits before sending your second mail).
Try to send mail from another account to be sure that this problem always occurs.

 

[slylos]

I've tried hotmail also with the same results. Also it didn't start until I installed qmail-scanner and clamav/spamassassin ... late last night I setup new tcpserver rules as per the qmail-scanner install dir's (scan everything external, and nothing on the same subnet), and now nothing from external domains seem to be getting through (local email works just fine)...

 

[thedaver]

You are most likely experiencing a crash of the SMTP run environment due to memory exhaustion; this is a common experience when adding qmail-scanner/etc. to an existing qmail environment.

Your /var/qmail/supervise/smtpd/run file includes a value for the maximum amount of RAM for tcpserver to allow before it terminates incoming mail handling. You should increase this value from the default of ~2000000 to around ~10000000



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[slylos]

I just finished going through spamassassin and qmail-scanner docs again and recompiled everything. I noticed I did miss some steps but they still don't seem like important ones even now - however I went through them anyway so we'll see what happens . . . Thanks for your help thedaver that makes sense to me and I did up the memory limit in the 'run' script ...

 

[slylos]

Ok I've upped it to 10,000,000,000 (without the comma's of course) which I suppose is around 10meg. Still not getting external mail. What is a normal softlimit setting? Also, I know that clamav and spamassassin are working now because all the tests work properly. However when I run the test script for qmail-scanner (./config/test_installation.sh -doit), I get an error from clamd:

clamd scanner error or memory/resource/perms problem - exit status 512/2
qmail-inject: fatal: qq temporary problem (#4.3.0)
Bad error. qmail-inject died

So it looks like its narrowed down to clamd failing, and possibly the same thing happening on incoming mail from external domains - except that its not being logged (the qmail-scanner test was logged however). I read somewhere to change the LANG environment variable to "en_us", I'm not sure where to do that at startup in SuSE 9.1, but I did that at the command prompt and reran test_installation.sh and it failed again. any idea's?

 

[slylos]

Disregard the previous post and please help me with this one:

I reinstalled clamav from source and recompiled qmail-scanner and reinstalled that as well - that test runs just fine now! Only thing is, I still can't receive email from external domains!! I got a message from yahoo's qmail-send saying it could not establish an SMTP connection to my server, but that was the emails I sent last night before I recompiled/reinstalled clamav and qmail-scanner. But I tried it again tonight after everything, and still have the same problem - no email and nothing to reference in any logs. I don't get it!! PLEASE HELP ME I'M LOSIN IT!! haha not really but please help me anyway ...

btw: I upped the softlimit to 30000000000 but it didn't seem to help ...

 

[thedaver]

OK, softlimit above 10000000 is generally excessive and can lead to issues in your processing of mail.

I'm inclined to think that you have a DNs or firewall issue that is preventing external firewalls from getting to you reliably.

Have you checked your DNS for accurate "A" and "MX" designations? Have you used "dig" from a remote host to see what the world sees? (try

http://www.dnsstuff.com

for this)
What do you see when you telnet to your SMTP port 25?

We should also be looking into your /var/qmail/control files to make sure that you've got yourself set up properly for incoming domains.

You should also take another look at your tcp.smtp file to make sure you haven't accidentally blackholed the outside world.

Finally, should all else fail, I would strongly urge you to re-build from this guide, which will most certainly give you happy, tingly feelings once done.

http://www.pipeline.com.au/staff/mbowe/isp/webmail-server.htm

Try those issues in order, with the rebuild as a step we take after ruling out everything else. Normally these kinds of issues are simple, hand-hits-forehead matters.





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[slylos]

The DNS 'A' test runs fine for mail.rockwithme.org (that is my actual domain, no hiding here!) but for the 'MX' test it fails. However when I try to send myself a test email it says "searching for MX record - got it!" and it says my server responds ok. I ran those tests from a remote location - I can terminal server into a one of the servers at work and do it and thats what I did. But here is an interesting note: I have "Can't do setuid" in my /var/log/qmail/smtpd/current logs and its right after it gets an incoming connection from hotmail and yahoo.

Here is tcp.smtp
-----------------------
127.:allow,RELAYCLIENT="",QS_SPAMASSASSIN="yes",QMAILQUEUE="/var/qmail/bin/qmail-scanner-queue"
:allow,QS_SPAMASSASSIN="yes",QMAILQUEUE="/var/qmail/bin/qmail-scanner-queue"
-----------------------

Also, I was able to send and receive email just fine from anywhere to anywhere before I installed spamassassin and clamav/qmail-scanner. So in my *assumption* I should be set up properly for receiving external mail.

Here is smtpd/current for dnsstuff test
---------------------------------------
tcpserver: status: 0/20
@40000000421769fc05b74b84 tcpserver: status: 1/20
@40000000421769fc05b766dc tcpserver: pid 6806 from 69.2.200.182
@40000000421769fc072070a4 tcpserver: ok 6806

http://wwwserver.rockwithme.org:192.168.1.2:25

test.dnsstuff.com:69.2.200.182::4363
@40000000421769fc1d2668f4 tcpserver: end 6806 status 0
--------------------------------------------------------

Here's whats in there this morning from hotmail
----------------------------------------------
@4000000042176be10c1c4204 tcpserver: ok 6937

http://wwwserver.rockwithme.org:192.168.1.2:25

bay102-f21.bay102.hotmail.com:64.4.61.31::8870
@4000000042176be1289fcd9c Can't do setuid
@4000000042176be137544c8c tcpserver: end 6937 status 0
----------------------------------------------

Thanks for your help thedaver!!!!!!

 

[slylos]

I GOT IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Looks like I forgot one last important step:

chmod 0755 qmail-scanner-queue.pl

I did that and sent myself an email from yahoo and it got there in a few seconds. Man thanks to everyone here for their help, and

THEDAVER YOU HAVE BEEN VERY HELPFUL!!!!!

Its because of guys like you that inexperienced linux admin hopefuls have a shed of hope to succeed! And also that Linux has a ton of hope to succeed as a concrete alternative to proprietary MS products. Now I can be confident that even though I already knew Exchange, I can replace it worry-free with qmail. My next project is porting our time clock program (which I wrote in C# and .NET) to C# and the Mono runtime (which I must say is awesome) ...

 

[thedaver]

You're most welcome!

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