Problem with outbound SMTP mail due to mailscanner overload.

[forhire]

Early this morning the mailscanner came to a crawl. After several attempts to restart the daemon the vendor recommend we "reload" the gateway. We mounted a new set of drives and re-installed. Mail was still crawling. After some more in-depth investigation it was found to be caused by a denial of service (joe job). We blocked mail at the firewall so we could spool out the new server and re-mount the old drives. At about 4:00 PM we started spooling out the 2+ gigs of mail that remained on queue. We still have about 3000 messages pending delivery.

Once we spool out what is in queue we will re-open the firewall and start accepting the huge backlog of mail that has been queued around the internet.

Randy

[forhire]

At just after 8:00 PM we restored mail service and all mail has been delivered. It was a long delay due to the volume of mail queued for delivery.

I have been onsite watching the host and mail is flowing smoothly without issue.

The vendor has inserted a number of trottles to help smooth mail delivery and will be monitoring it carefully.