> If these emails have been successfully sent,
> why ARE they showing back up in /var/amavis
> like this in the first place?

Since you are clued enough to know that search-fu exists, I'm guessing that my thoughts are obvious and already tried...

It is not impossible that somebody clueless enough to send 63M attachments to all her friends may not be on top of their delivery status. Perhaps not all messages have not successfully been sent and are hanging in the exim's queue. Until amavis says that the msgs have been delivered, exim will keep trying.

It might be worth looking exim's queue managing tools..

It might also be worth setting the maximum message size exim will accept...

Daniel Bentley wrote:
My search-fu is apparently weak, as I couldn't find this answer elsewhere.

Simply put, what exactly is the purpose of subdirectories in /var/amavis, mainly in the form like '/var/amavis/amavis-20050930T192802-19231'? It appears to be the location where amavis temporarily stores emails (raw, and separated into parts) for processing. What is the average duration for these sub-directories?

The reason: someone thought it'd be a brilliant idea to put a series of emails with images through email. We're talking 63M file attachments to -each- mail, and enough of these emails to total up to around 2.9 -GIG-.

We noticed that the email server was acting particularly sluggish, and 'top' revealed CPU usage of up to mid 90% and amavisd (running amavisd-new 2.3.1, spamd, uvscan, postfix, on Mandrake LE 2005 (aka. 10.2)) taking 500-600M of combined memory and swap. In trying to figure out where these problems were coming from, I visited the sender of all the files (I hate .bmp files more than ever now... -.- ), and she informed me that all emails had been sent, and had been received at the other end. So I thought, "Okay, I can clean those directories out of /var/amavis, maybe that'll help." As there were other sub-directories from 2004, I figured amavis might not always clear out temp email storage in /var/amavis/amavis-{date}T{number}-{number} sub-directories. So I stopped amavis and postfix, and wiped these sub-directories from /var/amavis.

Only... the majority of these emails (sent Mon. and Tues., wiped end of the working day on Tues.) started showing up again on Wed. o.o; Same emails, same dates for the bodies as evidenced in email.txt files, showing up aprox. every 30 min. So I wiped these sub-dirs again earlier today (Thurs.). In the past few hours, they've been coming back AGAIN. @.@

When I initially cleaded out /var/amavis, system usage by amavis and overall performance went back to normal. Each time one of these sub-directories shows up in /var/amavis again, there's a corresponding jump in CPU usage, often back up in the mid-90% range, and the amavisd process seems to continually grow in memory usage as more of these emails come back from the dead.

Any thoughts/ideas? Am I only exacerbating the problem by fiddling with these sub-directories in /var/amavis? If these emails have been successfully sent, why ARE they showing back up in /var/amavis like this in the first place?


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