40k+ Emails in Queue

[evisions]

I'm having some strange issue with the mail server. I have over 40,000 emails in the queue which have been there up to 40 days! Most of these emails appear to be either bounce messages from rejected virus emails, or emails to invalid addresses on the server. I looked at the account that most of the stuck emails are for and found that their default address is set to :blackhole: yet the undirected emails are in the queue not deleted. Their valid addresses are mostly forwards with only one actual pop address.

Does anyone have any advice for me on how to manage this? (I can't even look at all the messages in the queue let alone delete them one at a time - I'm afraid that if I hit delete all - which I'm very tempted to do - that I'll loose valid emails too) I was under the impression that bad emails wouldn't stay in the queue for this long.... Also, why aren't the blackhole emails being deleted?

[chirpy]

Some tips here:
http://forums.cpanel.net/showthread....d=1#post129794

Also, you should change those :blackhole: entries to :fail: so that the email isn't received into the mail server in the first place.

If email is still actually coming in and going out, then I'd be tempted to delete the lot.

[evisions]

Thanks Johnathon, I thought blackhole was the better option as it deleted the message without creating a failure, but if the fail causes it actually not to be received that is much better. I'll read through those tips.

[evisions]

One more thing, I'm getting a lot of zombie exim processes running, is this related to the huge mail queue or is the huge queue because of the zombies.... Some of them come and go, and there are a couple that hang around even after restarting exim.... I'm going to reboot the whole server tonight and see what happens to them, but I have a feeling they are going to come back. Any thoughts?

[chirpy]

I would suspect that they are related to the huge volume of mail in your queue. Zombies can occur for all manner of reasons, but I would take a guess that it has something to do with the Exim queue run not completing before the next one is initiated. Rebooting will get rid of the zombies, but not the underlying problem.

Can you send and receive email through the server, despite the huge mail queue? If so, as I mentioned before, I would be sorely tempted to delete the queue.