Mailing List Archive: Qmail: users

deferred messages

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frank at webnext

Sep 25, 2001, 10:30 AM

Post #1 of 5 (1298 views)
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deferred messages

I recently installed qmail and did a fairly large mailing (about 400k
messages). The same amount of mail was sent using sendmail on a slower
machine at the same time. It took qmail about 22 hours (!) to send the mail
and sendmail only took about 8. I suspect that the deferred message
schedule of qmail was the culprit since the mail list is probably not that
clean and qmail retries 11 times in the first 24 hours (whereas sendmail has
been configured to only try twice). Is my suspicion right or is it
something else?

I understand that hardware plays a huge role in all of this but if sendmail
is working better on a slower system, it's gotta be a software issue. Will
installing the big-todo and big-concurrency patches help much? iowait was
at about 70% when the mail was going out and there was only about 3.5MB of
free memory. I'm worried that the patches might push this box over the
edge.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Frank

maex-qmail at Space

Sep 25, 2001, 3:16 PM

Post #2 of 5 (1233 views)
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Re: deferred messages [In reply to]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2001 at 07:30:56PM +0200, Frank Pacione wrote:
> I recently installed qmail and did a fairly large mailing (about 400k
> messages). The same amount of mail was sent using sendmail on a slower
> machine at the same time. It took qmail about 22 hours (!) to send the mail
> and sendmail only took about 8. I suspect that the deferred message
> schedule of qmail was the culprit since the mail list is probably not that
> clean and qmail retries 11 times in the first 24 hours (whereas sendmail has
> been configured to only try twice). Is my suspicion right or is it
> something else?

- What is the value in your concurrencyremote ?
- Please define "to send the email" ?
- if you want to lower the number of retries look at
"queuelifetime" (man qmail-send)
- did you inject one message to 400K users or 400K messages to one user
each?

\Maex

--
SpaceNet AG | Joseph-Dollinger-Bogen 14 | Fon: +49 (89) 32356-0
Research & Development | D-80807 Muenchen | Fax: +49 (89) 32356-299
Stress is when you wake up screaming and you realize you haven't fallen
asleep yet.

lists-qmail at maexotic

Feb 4, 2010, 11:07 AM

Post #3 of 5 (1236 views)
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Re: Deferred Messages [In reply to]

On Thu, Feb 04, 2010 at 09:54:48AM -0500, Jon Daily wrote:
> I'm having trouble with a few different mail servers accepting my mail now.

What do the logs say?
The qmail-send log should tell you why the messages are deferred.
Change to your qmail-send log directory and do a
$ fgrep deferral: current
and see what it says. If "current" is to small (just turned over)
check a few of the latest @* files.

Also, you can use
# /var/qmail/bin/qmail-qread
to see which remote addresses are involved and if sender/recipient
combinations seem legit.

Also
Received: from unknown (HELO localhost) (10.177.66.74)
looks kinda strange.If the app server connects to localhost (as the
HELO suggests) it shouldn't read 10.177.66.74 but 127.0.0.1.
Spammers like to use localhost, as a lot of misconfigured servers
allow relay access from hosts named "localhost", even if its IP address
is not 127.0.0.1.

Problems like that resulted in 90% of the cases I have seen from spam
attacks. The addresses that were stuck in queue were b0rken addresses
where the domains exist, but the SMTP servers were gone/never existed.
You might want to check the message contents (you didn't say if the
messages from the app server were "plausible").

\Maex

jonfdaily at gmail

Feb 4, 2010, 12:05 PM

Post #4 of 5 (1234 views)
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Re: Deferred Messages [In reply to]

>> I'm having trouble with a few different mail servers accepting my mail now.
>
> What do the logs say?

delivery 97: deferral:
Connected_to_68.28.217.6_but_greeting_failed./Remote_host_said:_554_lxnipc6001.nmcc.sprintspectrum.com/

> Received: from unknown (HELO localhost) (10.177.66.74)
> looks kinda strange.If the app server connects to localhost (as the
> HELO suggests) it shouldn't read 10.177.66.74 but 127.0.0.1.
> Spammers like to use localhost, as a lot of misconfigured servers
> allow relay access from hosts named "localhost", even if its IP address
> is not 127.0.0.1.

So, the app server sends the smtp message to the mail server which
then sends it out. The app server is a different machine than then
mail server. Does this still look mis-configured? If so, what do I
need to do in order to get the mail server to recognize the app
server?

Thanks!

- Jon

lists-qmail at maexotic

Feb 4, 2010, 12:53 PM

Post #5 of 5 (1228 views)
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Re: Deferred Messages [In reply to]

On Thu, Feb 04, 2010 at 03:05:47PM -0500, Jon Daily wrote:
> >> I'm having trouble with a few different mail servers accepting my mail now.
> >
> > What do the logs say?
>
> delivery 97: deferral:
> Connected_to_68.28.217.6_but_greeting_failed./Remote_host_said:_554_lxnipc6001.nmcc.sprintspectrum.com/

Then it is irrelevant what your headers say, as the remote SMTP server
rejects you connection even before the greeting (HELO) is sent.

Two possibilities:
1) a braindead antispam setup. Some mailservers ignore errors before
greeting as permanent errors and do a MX backoff to the next
mailserver with a longer distance. But this doesn't look like it,
as messaging.sprintpcs.com does not list other MX records.
2) your IP address is on a blacklist. Spam appliances behave that way.
A check at http://www.dnsbl.info/ didn't give a block for 204.232.203.250
but checking with sendbase.org
http://www.senderbase.org/senderbase_queries/detailip?search_string=204.232.203.250
and
http://www.senderbase.org/senderbase_queries/rep_lookup?search_name=204.232.203.250&action%3ASearch=Search
reveales a *poor* reputation for you IP address/net block.
I guess this is the reason for the rejects.
If I connect to
mx.messaging.sprintpcs.com
from my (poor reputation) DSL box at home I get also rejected immediately.
If I connect from my (good reputation) mailserver I get a SMTP dialogue.
I have no idea how to clean up your status with senderbase.org,
especially as there are no records for your IP, but the bad reputation
seems to result from the overall bad reputation of the net block.

> > Received: from unknown (HELO localhost) (10.177.66.74)
> > looks kinda strange.If the app server connects to localhost (as the
> > HELO suggests) it shouldn't read 10.177.66.74 but 127.0.0.1.
> > Spammers like to use localhost, as a lot of misconfigured servers
> > allow relay access from hosts named "localhost", even if its IP address
> > is not 127.0.0.1.
>
> So, the app server sends the smtp message to the mail server which
> then sends it out. The app server is a different machine than then
> mail server. Does this still look mis-configured? If so, what do I
> need to do in order to get the mail server to recognize the app
> server?

Sorry, missed that app server and mail server are on different machines.
So the IP address listed is ok. The HELO *should* be irrelevant anyway.
But as written above, this setup does not cause the problems.

\Maex

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