Postfix corrupt queue : how to work with it

Question

The postfix server puts sometimes mails in corrupt queue. These mails are never checked because there is an error in the file (I see "bad record type: 43 in message content"). In the documentation, I can see "Unreadable or damaged queue files are moved here for inspection".

OK. I can read them with postcat, but after that, what should I do ? Can I remove them without error ? What should I do to put them back in send queue ? I found somewhere to move the files to maildrop but nothing happens.

Thanks !

Dom

Answer 1

It's quite a strange behaviour, I've never seen postfix doing that, ever, you either have a very old postfix, or you must have some sort of hardware problem somewhere, like memory corruption or hard drive corruption.

To put back your email into the queue, the easiest way would be to do so with postcat and a bit of awk, something like (but YMMV) :

postcat -q <m-id>  |
awk 'BEGIN {data=0}
     /^*** HEADER EXTRACTED/ {data=0;print "."; print "quit"}
     data==1 {if ($0 == ".") { $0 = ".."}; print}
     /^*** MESSAGE CONTENTS/ {data=1; print "DATA"}
     data==0 && /^sender:/ {print "MAIL FROM: " $2}
     data==0 && /^original_recipient: / {print "RCPT TO: " $2}' |
sendmail -bs

Answer 2

Can you provide a postfix version number? Which distribution is this?

(Still most likely this indicates a hardware problem.)

EDIT: then its filesystem corruption and/or memory problem. Try to run memtest.