How to check culprit user(s) in huge exim mail queue

[Bashed]

Anyone know how to check what user(s) are taking up the 700k+ (yes, 700,000+) emails in the exim queue? Either a command via ssh or using ConfigServer Mail Queues plugin?

Thanks.

 

[cPanelMichael]

Hello

Have you tried viewing a few of the messages to see the message contents and message headers?

exim -Mvb messageID
exim -Mvh messageID

Thank you.

 

[Bashed]

There's over 700,000 in the queue. I wiped the out last week, happened again today. I need to trace which user these mass emails are coming from. I want to know how to pull a stat/count of top user incoming/outgoing specifically in the queue but not sure how.

 

[cPanelPeter]

Hello,

The first step as cPanelMichael has explained is to view the headers and body of a particular message ID. That will help in determining if you're dealing with a compromised account or not. Likewise you can also grep for the messageID in the /var/log/exim_mainlog file to determine how/where it originated and why it's getting stuck in the queue.

Start there and it should lead you to a solution.

 

[acenetgeorge]

Check the /var/log/exim_maillog, and see if you see any patterns. Maybe grep the outlook for "<=" (the sending address) or look for "courier_login" or "dovecot_login" to see if maybe you have a compromised email account password. You could also look for "exceeded" or "failed" or "quota".

If you do not have any mail send limits, you may want to limit the hourly rate. We use 600, so we do something like this to look for accounts sending out a lot of spam:

exigrep exceeded /var/log/exim_mainlog | grep 600

There are all sorts of things you can search for in the mail logs to help track this down. Pattern recognition comes in VERY handy when digging through large logs.