On Fri, Sep 30, 2005 at 07:45:41PM -0600, 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.
Exactly.
> What is the average duration for these
> sub-directories?
They normally go away as soon as the email is successfully delivered
through amavisd to the other side.
> 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.
Sent yes, I suspect not received (or if they were, then amavisd
bombed out at the very tail end of the delivery process back into
Postfix.)
> 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.
They only get kept around when the process handling that mail bombs.
> 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. @.@
...
> 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?
Check your Postfix mail queue, or possibly mail queues for backup MX
servers; I suspect the emails are still sitting around in some mail
queue somewhere, and being fed back in at intervals, because Postfix
never saw a successful delivery through amavisd.
-- Clifton
--
Clifton Royston -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
I and I Computing - President
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