SMTP Queues in E2K

[striperstalker]

I have a single box exchange of about 125 users and I am noticing that the connections made as SMTP queues are hanging around for a long time (like all day) after the mail they contain has been routed. It doesn't seem to be creating any performance issue and we never get over a few hundred queues in the course of the workday. I know E2K is supposed to dynamically create these connection as separate queues and then release them as mail is routed. Has anyone seen this?

 

[mtb1996]

I recently had a problem with too many smtp queues bringing my mail server to a halt and we have a single sight with less that 25 users. It turned out to be NDRs in response to SPAM... since most of the REPLY TO: addresses were spoofed, the NDRs hung around in the outbound smtp queues for a long time. The backlog eventually taxed the server to the point where my server almost stopped processing mail entirely. I disabled sending NDRs and bought some antispam software from

http://www.policypatrol.com...

now it's smooth sailing. Needless to say, we were getting a ton of SPAM for such a small organization, so I had some housecleaning to do.

 

[MMCCSSEE11]

If the queue is used often enough it will hang around until the timeout.

 

[xmsre]

If the queue is used often enough it will hang around until the timeout."

Restated: If the queue is unused for the timeout period, it will go away.

Not to worry, the queues you see are not a real physical structure. There is only one queue directory per virtual server. As messages pass through the categorizer and advanced queing, their state is persisted by writing data to alternate streams on the files in the queue directory. For those inquiring minds that have to know, you can use the dumpmsg utility to view this information. A message doesn't actually leave the queue directory until it is transferred which may include a content conversion, delivered, or goes to badmail. The "queues" you see in the queue viewer each represents the state of a subset of messages in the queue directory for the virtual server.