[Mimedefang] milter timing out.

[Rick Mallett]

On Mon, 2 Feb 2004, -ray wrote:

>
> Having a weird milter timeout on my server as well.  Mail flows fine then
> for no apparent reason, the milters start timing out.  Sendmail reaches
> MaxDaemon (currently 250) and starts rejecting connections.  Even after
> that, mimedefang never seems to recover.  Restarting sendmail and
> mimedefang fixes it.  This has been happening once every day or two.
>

We were getting this quite often until we discovered that we were
being flooded by bounced forgeries, about 1,000,000 per day. Try
grep'ing in your mail logs for "User unknown" and see how many there
are, keeping in mind that this only works if they are local
recipients. If not, you'll have to figure out what an invalid
recipient looks like and grep for that.

If its several hundred thousand, then even if they are disposed of
with a minimum of processing in sendmail its still involves a fork and
its likely to be more than the machine can handle. We ended up having
to deploy a second server to handle some of the domains that were being
especially targetted, but it isn't nice since that machine is used for
development and needs to be taken out of service from time to time.

- rick