[PLUG] Sendmail Severe Errors

[Paul Heinlein]

On Sat, 2 Aug 2014, Rich Shepard wrote:

>   I am still trying to find what broke a month or so ago that caused 
> logwatch.pl to not send me a daily report. I've posted the situation 
> on the logwatch forum (hosted on sourceforge.net) but have seen no 
> reply. [....]
>
>  SEVERE ERRORS
>  -------------
>
>  System Error Messages:
>      savemail: cannot save rejected email anywhere: 2 Time(s)
>
>  Lost Queue Files:
>      ./qfs71DapiW022254: savemail panic
>      ./qfs71BjKDF019769: savemail panic

Further down this thread you mentioned that you may have fixed this 
problem, in which please ignore me...

My experience is that this sort of error is usually the result of a 
SMTP-level filter (e.g, a milterized SpamAssassin) that is rejecting 
the inbound mail. That message can't be delivered anywhere else since
there's no appropriate local user, and the remote SMTP server (even if 
"remote" means 127.0.0.1 or ::1) is rejecting it in transit.

So Sendmail panics; rather than discard the message, it renames them 
within /var/spool/mqueue (or clientmqueue) so it won't try to process 
them in the future.

If the problem is SpamAssassin, then either your rulesets will need to 
be tweaked to allow Logwatch messages to pass unfiltered or you'll 
need to whitelist messages from the originating host.

-- 
Paul Heinlein
heinlein at madboa.com
45°38' N, 122°6' W