queue growth?

[fenstrat]

We are getting alot of queues built up in the exchange system manager. All local delivery and external delivery queues are fine, but there are alot of queues to external servers that collect messages throughout the day saying the external server is not responding. They are set to delete after the message is 3 days old. Some of the queues go into a paused state. My question is, is this normal, is there anything I can do to stop the growth, and is this bad for system performance to have them in there? There are probable around 100 messages during a given time of day in the queues.
Thanks

 

[robbyb]

Unless these external servers are recognised by you, this may be spam. You can probably tell - some of the queues will have improbable names like msk.ru

Spam email may arrive at your server where they guess at a user being at your server. Your server tries to send a NDR, but being spam, the reply address (esp. the domain) is never genuine. So these queues can sit there for up to 48 hours, as your server retries.

It will have little effect on performance. But you may need to check your Badmail directory. Mail that can't be delivered will end up there, and there's no auto process to empty this directory. It's a dirty job but somebody's gotta do it....

If it is spam, then you probably need to look at some anti-spam software.

RobbyB