Where is MAILER-DAEMON Log emails coming from? 1

[dwesner]

The hard drive where my qmail queue is stored, started growing uncontrollably a couple weeks ago and I traced it down to messages that stay undelivered in the queue from MAILER-DAEMON that contain thousands and thousands of lines that look something like a log, and contain lines like the following:

Received: (qmail 16604 invoked by uid 701); 30 Oct 2010 23:30:23 -0000
Received: (qmail 16600 invoked by uid 701); 30 Oct 2010 23:30:23 -0000
Received: (qmail 16596 invoked by uid 701); 30 Oct 2010 23:30:23 -0000
Received: (qmail 16592 invoked by uid 701); 30 Oct 2010 23:30:23 -0000
Received: (qmail 16586 invoked by uid 701); 30 Oct 2010 23:30:23 -0000

I see the contents of the message by issuing a qmHandle -mxxxxx command after a qmHandle -l reveals entries like the following:

122971 (171, L)
Return-path: admin@mydomain.com
From: MAILER-DAEMON@myserver.com
To: admin@mydomain.com
Subject: failure notice
Date: 30 Oct 2010 23:45:20 -0000
Size: 3416785 bytes

I'm wondering what is generating these emails, what they represent, and how to turn them off? Also baffled as to why they're not being delivered to the "To" email address, since hundreds of other messages are flowing through to that address every day from this same server.

 

[Noway2]

It looks like you may have a program that is malfunctioning and its response is to email the administrator. As a starting point, does "invoked by uid 701" tell you anything? What application (system process) is assigned to user 701?

 

[dwesner]

The user is "admin", and you verified what I was thinking might be happening but wasn't sure, so this helps. But two questions:

1) Do you know what kind of qmail output written to this qmail message (e.g., what kind of qmail command would produce it) to help me try to track down the program that might be producing it?

2) Do you know what may be causing this message to not be processed when I'm seeing many other email messages being successfully delivered to this same admin account from this same server?