Postfix alias multiple mail delivery

Question

We have a Postfix server here that is servicing about 70-80 active users. We have a single alias for all users in the system that we manage manually in /etc/aliases. Occasionally, email sent to this all users alias is deferred due to a number of reasons, some examples are given below:

Jan 25 12:02:15 mailserver postfix/local[6733]: 78D4619014D: to=, relay=local, delay=1956, delays=1936/0.01/0/20, dsn=4.2.0, status=deferred (cannot update mailbox /var/spool/mail/user1 for user user1. unable to create lock file /var/spool/mail/user1.lock: File exists)

Jan 25 13:42:14 mailserver postfix/local[10757]: 78D4619014D: to=, relay=local, delay=7954, delays=7936/0/0/19, dsn=4.2.0, status=deferred (cannot update mailbox /var/spool/mail/user2 for user user2. unable to lock for exclusive access: Resource temporarily unavailable)

Once the message is deferred it's redelivered to every person the alias sends mail to, even if they've already gotten a copy. So occasionally a message will make the rounds 3 or 4 times before it finally gets to every user successfully.

Has anyone had experience with this problem and what did you do to fix it?

Answer 1

you can't have parallel delivery with mbox format.

 local_destination_recipient_limit = 1   #this is default, just remove from main.cf
 local_destination_concurrency_limit = 1

If the lock problem persist, then you have filesystem error or hard drive problem.

Answer 2

I think you use mailbox and not Maildir for your storage. So each time postfix must write on the user's mailbox file, it locks it. If you have a lot of simultaneous locks, there is maybe some problems. Do you use a delivering program (like procmail, dovecot-lda), or postfix write directly in files ? Which time the complete delivery take to be completely done when it doesn't hang ? Could you think to go to Maildir format, which doesn't need to locks files ? Are you on a network storage like NFS/SMB ?

Answer 3

Sure there was a time when this was a problem. It has been more than ten years ago when I was faced with a similar problem. But this is why someone invented Maildir which does not have these problems at all.

In your case you have a delay of more than two hours for one mail. This is incredibly bad. Change your setup. Even with millions of mails per day you should only have a delay of 2 seconds. Everything else is a bad configuration.