Huge mail delivering delay

[chielsen]

I'm having troubles with mail delivery now for quite some time.
At first i just sused the da exim and I had delays. Then i switched to dovecot, now i turned on spamassassin and it still occures.
It only seems to be taking longer and longer. Now i'm waiting more than 6 hours for mails to arrive.

What can be the problem? My server doesn't have a high load, or many e-mailaccounts.

 

[pucky]

Hard to tell. YOu can start by telling us what modification if any you have made to exim including any spam solutions you have installed or had installed etc etc etc.

 

[chielsen]

Well no mods, only enabled spamassassin. But before that i had the same problem.
I do see a mail queue of 64 pages long, all to addresses that don't exist. I don't think that is the problem.

Or is it that fact that i didn't edit exim config the cause of the delays?

 

[toml]

If they are all to address that don't exist, then that would explain why they are still there. More than likely they are frozen and will be removed after the timeout, which I think the default is 4 days.

64 pages of those messages, tell me someone is trying to use your server to send spam, and that could be the real reason for the delays of real email.

I suggest that you clear out your mail queue of spam messages, install the latest exim.conf ( if it has the relays.ordb.org RBL make sure to comment that out, since it no longer works ). That should at least limit the outgoing spam.

I am guessing that the source of those messages came from a comprised script on your server. I would monitor your mainlog file to see if the queue fills up again and if so, where are the messages coming from. If they are coming from the local host, you need to look find the source (perl,php,python,rootkit,etc) and eliminate it.

 

[chielsen]

I installed the new exim.conf and now the mail is arriving instantly!

The mails that were in the queue were not from localhost, just spam sent out over the internet that was frozen (couldn't send a message the account doesn't exist, how can i disable those messages?)

 

[toml]

In the DA administrator panel, go to Mail Queue Administration and select the bad emails and delete. You could also write a script similar to this:

#!/bin/sh
cd /var/spool/exim/msglog
for file in `ls -1`
do
  isfrozen=`grep -i frozen $file`
  if [ $? -eq 0 ]
  then
    exim -Mrm $file
  fi
done

I have not tested this, but it should remove all frozen messages from your queue.