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From: pdb@sei.cmu.edu (Patrick Barron)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Sendmail loses mail ?
Message-ID: <1359@aw.sei.cmu.edu>
Date: Tue, 19-May-87 04:28:08 EDT
Article-I.D.: aw.1359
Posted: Tue May 19 04:28:08 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 20-May-87 04:01:05 EDT
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Reply-To: pdb@sei.cmu.edu (Pat Barron)
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Here's a rather interesting phenomenon I've noticed with Sendmail 5.54.  Every
once in a while, for no readily apparent reason, it will drop a mail message
without warning.  The symptom is that the 'qf' file in the queue directory
mysteriously vanishes.  The 'df' file stays.  The message in question could
be either one being delivered to a user on my machine, or one being sent from
it.

If I look in syslog, I see that the message gets queued up just like it
should (the [IPC] mailer is marked as "expensive"), but it is never logged
as "stat=Sent".  Sometimes it'll be a message on which several failed
delivery attempts have already been logged; all the sudden, the qf file
goes away, and delivery attempts stop.

The following items are also worthy of note:
1)  On my system, it is possible (even probable) for two, or even three,
    queue runs to be going on at the same time.
2)  Sendmail 5.54 will unlink a 'qf' file of zero length and exit without
    logging anything.

I'd suspected that perhaps the lock file was being unlinked while the qf
was still open for writing (i.e., hadn't been fflushed, and therefore would
be of zero length), but I can't find anyplace in the code where this might
occur.

This has been driving my crazy for weeks now!  I've seen it happen on each
of half a dozen or so machines that I'm running 5.54 on.  Has anyone else
seen this before?  Anyone have a fix?

--Pat.