Mail server problem...

Hello, everybody...
I would like to express my little problem, and if someone can help me, I would be grateful...
I have a Qmail server running on my site on a RedHat 7 system. The problem is that I noticed that there are many messages that are being held on the queue of the server, and the "from" field is empty <>. Can anyone tell me what is going on?
I have to tell you that I'm not the person who deals with that manners, but I'm trying to solve this issue by my own interest only...
I could use some help, please contact me for further discussion...
You can email me at stpr@pathfinder.gr

Many thanks to everybody...!!!!

Hello,

First thing, you should look at the qmail's logs (ie /var/log/qmail/*/current) for more information and the frequency of the "suspected" messages. I don't think it is likely a qmail problem, more likely it is because of one of the client's misconfiguration.

Hi, thanks for your immediate reply...
If it is possible, could you give me some more instructions about it? I mean, what exactly i am looking for? I don't think either that it is a problem of Qmail, probably my server is being used for spam reasons, but I can't find the source of the spamming...
Thanks anyway, I 'll try to look at the log files and see if i can resolve this issue...

If the emails held in the queue are there because of a problem with your mailing system (qmail) or something else, then logically, you should see error entries within the Qmail log files as pointed by NSKE.

I wouldn't know exactly what your looking for, but you'll surely know when you see it!

Just look for errors!

hmm try locating the qmail-qread binary on your system ( "locate qmail-qread" ), and then execute it. You will then see a list of the messages that are currently on queue, along with some info like time, message ID, message size, recipient and sender. By using these information (basically, just the message ID), you can make a search at the qmail log files and should find a specific entry on what happened with each of those messages -like why they were rejected,

An other thing, these messages, whether spam or anything, they could remain at the queue because they were rejected by the qmail-scanner, a facility for qmail that allows other programs -antivirii, antispam scanners and such- to scan incoming and outgoing messages and reject them accordingly. Of course they won't remain for ever, there is an expiration time after which they will be discarded. Still, there is a better replacement for qmail-scanner, called Simscan , which rejects messages on the fly, without allowing them to even reach and haunt your queue and is also much faster, since it is written in C instead of PERL.