freebsd stable - Jun 2003 - sendmail: clientmqueue directory storing massive messages, not being cleared

I just got done sending 42,000 e-mail messages that were rotting away in
/var/spool/clientmqueue.  I figured out the command to do so was
"sendmail -L sm-msp-queue -Ac -q30m".

I never even knew that directory existed.  I thought everything queued was
kept in /var/spool/mqueue (which, I might add is being taken care of on a
regular basis.. just seems the problem lies in the /var/spool/clientmqueue
directory).  Is this a new thing that I'm stupidly unaware of?

Can you please explain the difference between /var/spool/clientmqueue and
/var/spool/mqueue and why one seems to be taken care of regularly, but the
other had 42,000 unsent messages?  When I start sendmail, I've always just
run "/usr/sbin/sendmail -bd -q60m -h10 -R full".  Do I need to do
something
differently?

Please cc: as I am not subscribed.  Thank you in advance for your help.


Chris

On Thu, 5 Jun 2003, Chris Byrnes wrote:
> Can you please explain the difference between /var/spool/clientmqueue and
> /var/spool/mqueue and why one seems to be taken care of regularly, but the
> other had 42,000 unsent messages?  When I start sendmail, I've always
just
> run "/usr/sbin/sendmail -bd -q60m -h10 -R full".  Do I need to do
something
> differently?
This allows the local system to send mail normally (i.e., store mail for
retry in cases where it could not be immediately sent) but yet not run a
persistent listening sendmail daemon. This was added in the sendmail 8.12
range and has been active on FreeBSD since the early 4.X days.  Even if
you had

sendmail_enable="NO"

in rc.conf, the clientmqueue scanner should have started up. You had to
make it

sendmail_enable="NONE"

to completely shut it off.

-- 
Doug White                    |  FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
dwhite@gumbysoft.com          |  www.FreeBSD.org

> I never even knew that directory existed.  I thought everything queued was
> kept in /var/spool/mqueue (which, I might add is being taken care of on a
> regular basis.. just seems the problem lies in the /var/spool/clientmqueue
> directory).  Is this a new thing that I'm stupidly unaware of?
> 
> Can you please explain the difference between /var/spool/clientmqueue and
> /var/spool/mqueue and why one seems to be taken care of regularly, but the
> other had 42,000 unsent messages?  When I start sendmail, I've always
just
> run "/usr/sbin/sendmail -bd -q60m -h10 -R full".  Do I need to do
something
> differently?
Please read /etc/mail/README (or /usr/src/etc/mail/README if you don't
keep /etc/ up to date).  Also, `man rc.sendmail` for more information
about sendmail startup.