Article:		Sanitizing Mail on Panther Server
Subject:		Deferred Looping?
Date:		2004-02-20 15:08:26
From:		juhnke
I have over a hundred users on my server (Panther). Spamassassin, Anomy/Virex are installed and this message appears frequently in the mail.log: Feb 20 17:02:13 postmaster postfix/pipe[14910]: 42B1614D7B7: to=<user@domain.com>, relay=procmail, delay=26, status=deferred (temporary failure) Because the traffic is so massive, it's hard to locate the "from" entry to determine if that is a factor. The deferred emails appear to build up and finally bounce. Legitimate emails are bouncing. What is causing the deferral? How do I debug?

Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

• Deferred Looping?
  2004-02-21 13:55:50  loganj1 [Reply | View]
  
  
  It's possible that you're suffering from the (procmail) case sensitive username delivery problem mentioned elsewhere in these followup notes - a solution is also provided. You can verify this easily by sending a message to one of your users with the username in upper case.
  
  You can debug a deferred message using the file name of the message from a directory listing of "/var/spool/postfix/deferred/*/*" as the "queue-id" argument in the "postsuper" command, as follows:
  
  postsuper -r 5DF2216EDC4 deferred
  
  (where "5DF2216EDC4" is the filename of the message)
  
  This will cause the message to be requeued immediately, with new entries in "/var/log/mail.log" that you can work with.
  
• Deferred Looping?
  2004-02-21 13:58:37  loganj1 [Reply | View]
  
  
  And once you've fixed the problem you can cause all the deferred messages to be delivered with the command ...
  
  postsuper -r ALL deferred