On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 05:19:05PM -0500, Lance Tagliapietra wrote:
Looking closer, exim is run by a cron task periodically, to try to
re-send email that could not be sent, or was queued for some reason. If
the message could not be delivered, it sits in the queue. Due to a
mis-configuration of exim, I had system messages to root sitting in
there, all the mail to support popularity-contest, and others, for about
6 years! There were about 1000 files there to be processed, each time,
which simply took time.
[...]
Note that all this time I was able to send email/ receive email and
didn't really know about much system generated email.
You could run exim -d -qff <msgid> to see why those mails in the queue are
failing.
I suffered from a similar problem once and wrote a little Python script to
deal with this problem. It tries to flush the queue and depending on the
error code it gets back, it either tries to deliver the mail again, spool it
again or simply delete it. If it can't send mails for a certain amount of
time in the queue, it deletes the mail as well.
The script is attached and as always: use it on your own risk! ;)