Mail delay related to virus scanner

[forhire]

It appears that our e-mail virus scanner is working overtime attempting to spool some e-mail. I restarted the daemon about a half hour ago to force the mailer to deliver the spooled e-mail. At present there is about 400 megs worth of mail to be pushed to the pop3 server. The server is running at about 90% cpu usage and I expect it may be a few hours before the complete spool is fed out.

I'm not sure what has caused the delay. We normally process serveral gigs worth of mail per day so 400 megs doesn't appear to be a lot.

[forhire]

I have found that an infected host was sending a TON of e-mails. We have blocked myw-stp-196-34-112-248.sentechsa.net[196.34.112.248] pending removal of their infection. Since 5:00 AM to 10:00 AM the infected machine loaded up our mail scanner with 64210 messages to process.

[forhire]

I wrote a script to delete the bogus messages that remained in the spool. Of the 64120 messages I was able to purge 8230 messages. This should help with the load. I'm working on the new script to purge any remain bogus mails that have been scanned already.

[forhire]

I have purge an additional 8460 garbage messages.

[forhire]

We're making progress. In the last few minutes since purging the 16,000 or so garbage messages we have delivered about 100 megs worth of mail. We still have about 400 megs waiting in the spool but we are finally seeing a positive delivery rate. At this rate we should finally finish in an hour or two.

[forhire]

Purged another 5063 garbage bounce e-mails. This should speed delivery more.

[forhire]

Further worked my script and purged another 5134 garbage messages.

[forhire]

So far I have purged 26,887 of the remaining garbage e-mails. This certainly cuts down on the delivery-bounce loop that was taking so many cpu cycles. At present I still have 343 megs remaining to be delivered. These are all most likely valid e-mails.

[forhire]

All the messages have been moved from the antivirus server to the main mail server (pop3.lewiscounty.com). At present the there are 320 megs worth of mail waiting to be scanned by spamassassin and delivered to their final destination. My personal mail is beginning to trickel in. This should happen faster than on the virus scanning server as it has more processors.

[forhire]

After some coaxing we're finally beginning to see the mail spool feed out into the mail boxes. The waiting spool has finally dropped below 300 megs.

[forhire]

All mail has been delivered. Fixed.