Well, I looked through the logs and found it tended to occur in blocks... you'd have a day or two (I think the longest stretch was ~5 days) when it would occur often, and then weeks at a time when it wouldn't at all. It didn't seem to be a 100% go/no-go thing that I can see... for example, we had someone who triggered a message spurt nine times over a ~30 minute period during the last problem block, and six went normally, three failed. The other problem is that I can't know it's failing WHEN it happens, only after... basically I do "grep sendmail error_log | wc -l" and as long as the number hasn't gone up, we're fine. If it's redlining something for 10 seconds at a time, it's back to normal before I can go and fire up any measurements. Maybe it should email me if it can't send email? :D :D :D Of course, it hasn't done it in like 28 hours now, but it matters to me that I can know what's wrong, in the event it happens again. -----Original Message----- From: Alex Dean To: Main PLUG discussion list Sent: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 4:24 pm Subject: Re: PHP mail() woes Floyd Arguello wrote:  > On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 9:09 PM, wrote:  >> Weird amusement:  >>  >> #service qmail stop  >> Stopping service qmail:#  >> (for some reason, it never says "[OK]", wether you stop or restart)  >>  >> Run the "send 50 messages to hopeless@invalid.invalid" script.  >>  >> Wait for it to finish - doesn't report the mail() calls failed  >>  >> restart in a panic (it is a production box after all :P) service qmail  >> start  >>  >> They seem to have processed normally, like it respawned qmail on demand  >> of the php script requesting sendmail. Is that how it's supposed to  >> operate?  >>  >> Also, reviewing the logs, it seems that it occurs in blocks... you'll  >> get a bunch of failures for a few days, then none for 20 days or so at  >> a time (the server typically gets 15-30 or so days uptime, and it's at  >> 29+)    FWIW, years ago I used a PHP script to send hundreds of thousands of emails a week with no issues, and it wasn't a whole lot more than a wrapper around the mail() function. (No, not spam. Newsletters people subscribed to.)    When you get a bunch of failures, are some messages sent correctly and others die, or does everything break during a fixed window of time? Having everything run fine, then everything fails for a while, then works again with no apparent change on your end, sounds like some service you're relying on is going away then coming back.    If so :    * Maybe DNS is slow sometimes?    * Is qmail sending mail directly, or just handing the mail off to another server (smarthost, I think its called)? If that upstream server is busy/unavailable periodically, that would be an issue.    alex  --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss