Queue question

[Praecentius]

I had a look in my /var/spool/mqueue directory and found about 3000 files in there (various Qf, df, xf files). Doing a 'mailq' command it shows the queue is empty. I tried restarting sendmail but the queue still remained empty. What could be the reasons these files don't show up in the queue? Some message may be important and I'd like to force them to go back into the queue. How would I do this? And what are some reasons this happened and how to prevent it in the future. Using Sendmail 8.12.11

Thanks,
-Mike

 

[Praecentius]

NEVERMIND.

I found the answer the bat book (2nd ed.) section 23.3 "A Bogus qf File".

In my situation rejected email could not be saved to the postmaster (root) account (permission problem). In each of the xf files I found a message saying so. The qf files were then renamed with Qf (bogus files) that the queue did not processes. Writing a quick little shell script to rename these Qf files back to qf files added them back into the queue and they were happily processed.

-Mike