What do you do when you massive overload of unwanted mail that is coming to your server?  Recently I saw a Postfix Mail server that had gone down some months ago but had 10s of thousands of email ready to  be sent.  When it was repaired it began sending tons of old mail....mail that was simply not needed to send any longer. This is a ...

Recently my mail server just stopped.  No indication of problems just no mail delivered.  So what do you do in this situation?  Since I have set up so I receive an email summary of mail each day, when that does not come, it tells me I have trouble. 1. Check the Logs This seems so obvious, but in reality it is easy to do a lot of other things before you check the logs...check the logs first.  So what I find in the logs is this: May 12 19:28:44 ...

Recently, working on amavisd-new and restarting it broke several perl modules that are required.  The results of this was that the mail server quit sending mail because it could not process mail due to the broken modules.  Here is the log file info that helped me locate the problem. Mar 20 03:23:33 ns postfix/smtp[20284]: ...

Mail Does Not Send A common problem is finding that mail is not sending correctly and that the /var/spool/clientqueue is filling up with files. This directory can actually shut down your server if you do not have a separate directory for /var when this happen. The speed at which this happens is determined by the amount of mail that is being sent. Cause of the Problem: The cause of the problem is most often a mis configured firewall or a mis configured ...

It is important to verify that MX records can be seen.  To check use the dig command with the -t option which will allow you to do an MX lookup.  This example shows the MX records for the myexample.com domain which is using the ns.example.org server as the mail server. dig -t MX myexample.com ; <<>> DiG 9.2.4 ...

One of the best ways to begin troubleshooting is to check your logs.  Here is a script that you can create that provides a timestamp of the current problems and then will email you that data to a a chosen email account. #!/bin/sh # Check Logs, Mail Output with Timestamp TIMESTAMP=`date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S`; echo $TIMESTAMP egrep  ...

Problem: Cannot Receive Mail In this example the user can send mail and it all works correctly but the user is not able to receive any mail. However, viewing the /var/log/ Sep 17 13:25:50 ns postfix/smtpd[17971]: > rn-out-0910.google.com[64.233.170.190]: 250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as 4A454207D8D Sep 17 13:25:50 ns ...

Checking Logs The file /etc/syslog.conf contains a line that is used to copy all mail by syslogd (CentOS). Note that Suse uses syslog-ng and so that config file is found at /etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf (see below). Here is that line(CentOS): # Log all the mail messages in one place. mail.* -/var/log/maillog So the location of the maillog is listed and you can use this command to locate the most notable issues with Postfix. # ...