Sendmail mailboxes and Errors

[Mlima]

Hi:

Two questions on Sendmail 6 under Linux Red Hat 7.1:

1) Sometimes a user can't read his mailbox, because for any reason it is locked. Then we wait a few minutes and the system unlocks it and he can read normally. But there's some times when it doesn't happen and it remains locked or it gives messages like Server Failed. On some of these times we have to restart Sendmail or even reboot the server. I ask: is there a way of redoing or reconstructing or reactivating just that mailbox in order to make it available again, without restarting Sendmail or rebooting the server?

2) I would like to sometimes see exactly what happens when a user claims he is not able to read his mailbox. Where does the Sendmail log these attempts or errors? Is it necessary to modify any configuration parameter in order to have this error-log written by Sendmail?

Thanks a lot.

Mario Lima./

 

[natural1]

I am not to familiar with Linux but maybe a solution to a similar problem on NT & Unix would help...see below:


Sendmail for NT 2x/Sendmail for NT 3x/: The user should have
mail, but can't access their POP mailbox.

This solution details how to unlock a user's POP3 mailbox.
This can cause users not to be able to access their mailbox for example.

Resolution
For POP connection problems, such as when a user's phone
connection hangs up while downloading mail, sometimes leave behind stale POP3 locks. These are leftover lock files which cause a mailbox to be stuck in locked state and prevent a user from being able to get back into their
mailbox to get their mail. To clear this, you will need to delete the leftover lock (username.idx) file from the user's mail spool directory in the Sendmail installation location in the '\(SendmailRootDir)\spool' directory by default.
On UNIX, you will need to delete the leftover lock (.lock)
file from the user's mail spool directory.If the transmission crashes repeatedly at the same point
during transmission, check if there's large message in the mailbox which may be causing the process to time out.

hope this helps!

 

[Mlima]

Thanks natural1. Maybe it will help. I think this is exactly the situation that happens.