Savemail panic

Red Phoenix

Registered
Within the past twenty-four hours, I've noticed a lot of messages in my console such as

Oct 18 22:56:23 redphoenix sendmail[5201]: f9J2uM505201: Losing ./qff9J2uM505201: savemail panic

Oct 18 22:56:23 redphoenix sendmail[5201]: f9J2uM505201: SYSERR(root): savemail: cannot save rejected email anywhere: No such file or directory


My best interpretation of this is that someone's trying to send mail to my local account, but this doesn't make any sense, since no one should be trying to do that (since I only use my local e-mail account for cron reports).

Anyway, is this something I should worry about? Sendmail is a scary beast that I try not to mess with if at all possible, so I don't really know much about it.
 
This may be worthless speculation, but I believe sendmail is having trouble sending, not receiving, and is unable to send errors via the normal methods. Is there a file

/var/spool/mqueue/Qff9J2uM505201

(note the uppercase Q instead of qff9J2uM505201)? Have a look at it to see if it has any interesting information. Is there also a /tmp/dead.letter?
 
The file Qff9J2uM505201 does indeed exist, but no dead.letter. Anyway, I similarly checked the dff9J2uM505201 file, and it turns out that it's just the daily cron cleanup job. I have a .forward file for root, and so this normally gets forwarded to my administrative account. For some bizarre reason, this didn't happen last night. I found my Linksys router unresponsive this morning and had to reset it, so this might be related (both being unusual things to happen).

Since I now know the e-mail is irrelevant, is there a way to remove it from the queue? A quick check of man sendmail doesn't seem to reveal anything.
 
in /private/var/log

if you see some messages about group write permission

sudo chmod 755 /private/etc
ls -alF /private
to check owner should be root

otherwise, if you use DHCP with your Router..maybe your machine had no id.

some other dependency on you rsendmail.cf

see
http://www.tijsseling.com/professional/xtips.html

for tips about sendmail/mail operation
 
For removing files in /var/spool/mqueue, you should be able to just remove the df... file and qf... file (or in this case, Qf... file). If you run 'mailq' it'll give you the queue ID of any messages in the queue (like f9J2uM505201), and can rm *f9J2uM505201 to get all the related files. 'mailq' again to verify the queue is empty.
 
It appears to have been a problem with the router (things have worked fine since yesterday morning). And unfortunately, the Q-ID that mailq gives doesn't seem to be relevant. I might try stopping and starting sendmail, and see if that works.
 
Back
Top