Bug 29251

Summary:	found a giant /var/spool/clientmqueue dir eating 60%++ of my / !
Product:	Mageia	Reporter:	Jean-François Bachelet <jfbachelet>
Component:	RPM Packages	Assignee:	Christiaan Welvaart <cjw>
Status:	RESOLVED OLD	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	Normal	CC:	davidwhodgins, jfbachelet
Version:	8
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Source RPM:	sendmail-8.16.1-1.mga8.src.rpm	CVE:
Status comment:

Description Jean-François Bachelet 2021-07-13 01:15:14 CEST

Description of problem:

when working on the today's update I found that I was lacking / space.

after killing old kernels and their sources, I've stumbled upon a giant directory in /var/spool : 'clientmqueue' is 14 GO in size and eats more than 60% of the / space...

what is it for ? there are just plain text files here, from some bytes to hundred of megabytes...
the oldest one is from the day I've installed Mageia 8 on my machine and there are new files everyday that piles up in it.

why it is not purged regularily ? it is a 'spool' after all...

is there a bug that that's been ignored in Mageia8?

is it safe to purge it manualy ?

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
Mageia 8 new install after 3 monthes...

How reproducible:
?

Steps to Reproduce:
1. have a look at your /var/spool/clientmqueue dir and see if it has inflated like mine
2.
3.

Bugsquad Help !!!

Jean-François Bachelet 2021-07-13 01:15:26 CEST

CC: (none) => jfbachelet

Comment 1 Dave Hodgins 2021-07-13 01:46:22 CEST

Assigning to the registered maintainer of sendmail

Assignee: bugsquad => cjw
CC: (none) => davidwhodgins
Summary: found a giant /var/spool/clienmqueue dir eating 60%++ of my / ! => found a giant /var/spool/clientmqueue dir eating 60%++ of my / !
Source RPM: (none) => sendmail-8.16.1-1.mga8.src.rpm

Comment 2 Dave Hodgins 2021-07-13 02:07:58 CEST

As to the contents of the file, I think it's mail sent by programs on that
computer. Probably just messsages to the root user from various cron jobs.

Running the mail command as root (in a terminal such as konsole or
gnome-terminal) will allow you to confirm that.

I normally use postfix rather then sendmail, so I'm not sure if there's anything
in that file that should not be deleted. I'll leave that for the maintainer to
answer whether or not it's safe to delete it's contents.

https://www.networkinghowtos.com/howto/sendmail-mail-aliases/ shows how
to create an alias in sendmail. It would be best to add an alias to your
user id and using a mail program to monitor those messages.

Comment 3 Christiaan Welvaart 2021-07-13 20:02:48 CEST

Maybe you have jobs on your system (as said earlier, mostly cron jobs) trying to send mail (using the sendmail command I guess), but you do not have a sendmail daemon configured and running that processes this queue. If you did, these mails would be delivered to /var/spool/mail/ , where mail clients can access them, or to external mail servers.

If you want to receive such e-mails, you need to configure an e-mail system I suppose.

Otherwise you can just remove this queue, and remove sendmail from the system so the queue does not get filled again...

Comment 4 sturmvogel 2022-12-04 13:41:22 CET

Due to no response from the reporter for over one year...closing as OLD.

Resolution: (none) => OLD
Status: NEW => RESOLVED